Cassirer and Langer on Myth: An Introduction 0815324650, 9781138969926, 9781315051321

Citation preview

Cassirer and Langer on Myth An Introduction

William Schultz

CASSIRER AND LANGER ON M Y T H

This page intentionally left blank

CASSIRER AND L A N G E R ON M Y T H AN INTRODUCTION

WILLIAM SCHULTZ

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group NEW YORK AND LONDON

First published by Garland Publishing, Inc. This edition published 2013 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 711 Third Avenue New York, NY 10017

Routledge Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon 0X14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2000 by William Schultz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schultz, William, 1953Cassirer and Langer on myth : an introduction / William Schultz, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8153-2465-0 (alk. paper) 1. Cassirer, Ernst, 1874-1945. 2. Langer, Susanne Katherina Knauth, 1895-1985 3. Myth. I. Schultz, William. II. Title. B3216.C34S36 2000 291.1'3'0922—dc21 99-086537

For Liana, Hero in My Own Myth

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

xiii xix xxi

Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgments PART I. MYTH IN CASSIRER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SYMBOLIC FORMS CHAPTER

CHAPTER

1 Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career: An Overview of Cassirer's Theory The Formative Years The First and Most Developed Stage The Second and Third Stages The Application of the Theory to Modern Life 2 Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture: Assumptions, Methods, and Goals General Features Rejection of Nonphilosophical Explanations Evaluation of Previous Philosophical Explanations The General Difficulty with Philosophizing about Myth A Philosophical Definition Is Needed The Type of Cassirer's Philosophy The Origin of Cassirer's Philosophy in Hegel's

vu

1

3 3 7 8 9

17 17 19 22 23 31 32 40

Contents

Viii

The Founding Principles of Myth and the Other Cultural Forms The General Plan The Criteria of an Individual Symbolic Form Notes CHAPTER

3 Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1 : Its Symbolism in Perception and Imagination The Importance of Symbolism for a Theory of Myth The Start of Mythical Symbolism: From Animal Signal to Human Symbol The Symbol of the Mythical Consciousness Is the Image Symbols Make the First Worldview of Humanity The Change in the Symbolism Notes

CHAPTER

4

CHAPTER

5 Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3 : The Structure of Behavior: Cause, Thing, and Soul/I The Categories of Cause, Thing, and Soul/I Mythical Cause: The Hypostasis of the Feeling of Any Relation The Mythical Thing or Physical Object The Mythical Consciousness Evolves from a Sense of the Soul of All Things to an Almost Individual "I"

41 45 51 54

55 55 60 70 75 78 81

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2: The Structure of Behavior: Space, Time, and Number 83 The Structure of Myth: Its Inner Form Comprised of Categories 84 Mythical Space: The Space of Feeling and of the Human Body 89 Mythical Time: The Consciousness of Moments of Feeling 100 Mythical Number—Cannot Be Distinguished from Qualities of Things 110 Notes 116 117 117 118 132

152

Contents CHAPTER

CHAPTER

CHAPTER

CHAPTER

ix

6

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4: The Evolution of Mythical Thinking The Law of Mythical Thinking The Evolution of Mythical Thought: Its Dialectic The Mythical Dialectic and the Three Purposes of Human Culture

7 Myth Has a Permanent Power: A Universal Function of Human Activity Does Science Eclipse Myth? Myth Creates a Universal Function of Human Activity How "Myth" Remains in Science Notes 8 Myth Recurs and Progresses: Toward an Ideal Limit of Knowledge The Problem of the Relationship of the Universal Function of Myth and That of Science The Solution to the Problem of the Development of the Functions: The Ideal Limit What the Ideal Limit Accomplishes in General for His Philosophy and in Particular for the Theory of Myth How Myth Develops toward the Ideal Limit The Recurrence of Myth in Postmythical Worldviews Notes 9 Myth Affects Modern Life: The Application of the Theory From the Theory of Myth to Its Application The Coexistence of Myth and Other Forms in Modern Culture The Recurrence of Myth: When and Why The Mythical Status of Nazi Politics Modern Myth Is United with Technology What Philosophy Can Do to Combat Dangerous Political Myths

161 161 171 184

191 191 195 201 203

205 205 211 215 217 220 223 225 225 226 228 233 238 240

Contents

X

Myth as a Continuing Aspect of Modern Political Life Modern Myth Outside Politics Notes PART II MYTH IN LANGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN FEELING CHAPTER

CHAPTER

10 Myth in Langer's Life and Career: The Quest for the Roots of Myth The Formative Years and Early Work Before Philosophy in a New Key (1895-1942) The First Creative Period: Doing Philosophy in "The New Key" Based on a Theory of Symbolism Langer's Second Main Period: A Theory of Art in Feeling and Form Philosophical Sketches (1962) and Myth in Modern Life The Final Period of Her Philosophy: The Theory of the Evolution of Mind Conclusion about the Role of the Theory of Myth in Her Entire Career Notes 11 Myth Is in "a New Key": A Type of Symbolism Like Art and Music The New Key: The Movement Emphasizing Symbolism, and Langer's Emphasis on the Prediscursive The Nature of Human Symbols: Their Difference from Animal Signals How Langer's New Key Differs from Cassirer's Approach Langer's Generative Ideas and the Generative Idea of Langer Presentational and Discursive Symbols: Mythical Symbols Are Presentational The Mutual Influence of Language and Myth Langer Seeks the Roots of Sacrament

242 245 247

249

251 254 255 257 260 262 265 266

267 269 270 272 274 277 279 281

Contents

Xi

The Development of Ritual from Motor Attitudes The Explanation of Magic as the Presentation of Religious Symbols The Start of Myth and the Rise of Theology from It Against the View of Personificiation: The Functions of Hypostasis and Generalization Myth in "The Fabric of Meaning" The Relationship of Philosophy in a New Key to Later Works CHAPTER

CHAPTER

12 Myth Is a "Form of Feeling": A Definition through a Symbolic Theory of Art Myth in the Plan of Feeling and Form Myths as Metaphors of Bodily Feeling and Inner Awareness The Root of Myth in Feeling: "Chapter 12. The Magic Circle" Myth as a Preparation for Art 13 Myth Has a Biological Basis: The Underlying Physical Processes The Plan of the Three Volumes The Biological Precondition of Human Symbolism The Major Shifts from Myth to Modern Civilization The Behavioral Change from Animal to Human: The Making of a World The Behavioral Change from Animal to Human: Giving an Account of the World and Oneself "The Spirit-World" The Second Shift: "The Dream of Power" "Dream's Ending : The Tragic Vision" "The Ethnic Balance" "The Breaking": End of the Tribal Pattern of Society The Balance in Each Culture Mathematics, The Reign of Science, and the Open Ambient of Modern Culture Notes

283 284 286 287 289 289

291 293 294 296 298

299 300 302 306 307 309 311 312 314 315 317 319 319 320

Contents

Xii

CHAPTER

14 The Global Society Needs Myth: Its Solutions to Problems of Modern Life 321 The Regression to Primitive Myth 321 The Lack of Myths in Modern Life 322 The Imbalance in Modern, Global Society 323 The Social Causes of the Lack of Myth (Demythologization) 325 Other Problems Caused by the Lack of Myth 327 Social Problems of the Decline in Myth and Art 328 Solutions by the Power of Myth That Remains 329 Solutions by Philosophy and Myth 330 Solutions by Art and Myth 331 Conclusion about Langer's Ideas on Myth in Modern Life and Their Relation to Her Theory of Myth 333

CHAPTER 15 Judging the Two Theories: Their Influence and Places in History The Influence on Subsequent Research The Places of Cassirer and Langer in Intellectual History The Difference in Cassirer's and Langer's Ideas of Philosophy The Probable Judgment by the Future The Myth of the Man and "the Myth" of His Philosophy Notes Selected Bibliography: Cassirer's and Langer's Philosophies of Myth Index

335 335 339 339 340 343 346

347 371

Abbreviations

Einstein's Theory of Relativity (bound with Substance and Function)

ETR

Essay on Man, An

EM

Feeling and Form

FF

Joseph Campbell

JC

Language and Myth Logic of the Humanities, The

LM LH

Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling

Mind

Myth of the State, The

MS

Philosophical Sketches Philosophy in a New Key

PS PNK

Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, The

PEC

Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, The

PSF

Practice of Philosophy, The

PP

Problems ofArt, The

PA

Substance and Function (bound with Einstein's Theory of Relativity) Symbol Myth, and Culture

SF SMC

xiii

This page intentionally left blank

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) (Courtesy of Connecticut College Archives)

This page intentionally left blank

Ernst Cassirer (New York, 1944) (From Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer: Erinnerungen von Toni Cassirer, Gerstenberg Verlag, Hildesheim, 1981.)

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

The commentator of the ideas of another person always faces the predicament stated by Borges: anyone wanting to make an absolutely accurate and complete map of a country would end up making one at least as large as the country itself. To avoid this problem I try not to discuss every aspect of the theories of myth but only to present the most important stages in their development. As there is no study of Ernst Cassirer's theory of myth in the context of his whole philosophy and of Susanne Langer's theory of myth in relation to it, the following study is original insofar as it presents the ideas to university students, any person interested in myth, and philosophers unacquainted with their theories. Many disagreements in interpretation by scholars have not been presented because such discussion belongs more in a book for a much more limited audience. The theory of Langer has been discussed much less; it repeats many aspects of Cassirer's theory and it is much less developed than is Cassirer's. Nontheless, it does make some important developments. Chapters 1 and 2 prepare the general reader for the more specific philosophical discussions. In Chapter 1, the context of the theory of myth in his life and work reveals why it takes the particular course throughout his career that it does—especially his own experience as the victim of prejudice in Nazi Germany. In Chapter 2 the unique approach of Cassirer is discussed. In this way it is hoped that a common background can be created for a range of audiences and that enough background will allow the reader to become acquainted with the full range of Cassirer's theory, which comprises three stages. The discussions of Cassirer's theory to xix

XX

Preface

date are rather incomplete. Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6 present the definition of myth as a worldview or "symbolic form." Most of the quantity of writing by Cassirer is concentrated on this definition. Equally important, though not discussed as much by Cassirer, are the second and third stages, in which myth is seen to have a permanent power and is seen to recur at higher levels of more advanced cultures. These theoretical ideas are important for the application of the theory of myth to modern political life in Chapter 9. The final chapters, Chapters 10 through 14, present a discussion of Langer's theory of myth especially in relation to Cassirer's. Chapter 10 situates her theory of myth in her entire career, a fact which explains some differences from Cassirer's approach. Chapters 11,12, and 13 center of different works. Chapter 15, based on Philosophical Sketches (1962) and some essays, is on myth in modern life. The conclusion discusses the influence of their writings on the philosophy of myth up to the present day and their place in history. In general the book presents the three stages of Cassirer's theory of myth and its application to modern political life. The three stages can be represented as three conclusions about myth: myth is a worldview or symbolic form, it has a permanent power in all human cultures, and it recurs at higher levels in more advanced societies. The book also presents Langer's emendations. Langer's theory is not as extensive nor as groundbreaking as Cassirer's is. Nevertheless, she makes some important clarifications, changes, and extensions to the philosophical framework which she acknowledges she does not replace. This book should prepare the reader—from whatever academic discipline—to investigate the scholarly issues concerning the two philosophies and the general topic of myth on an advanced level. These issues are still very much alive and this book may suggest even to specialists some directions for further inquiry. Dr. William Roger Schultz Department of English Studies The University of Athens, Greece

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the many people who have helped me with this study. Some doctoral students in the United States helped to update my collection of scholarship: Christina Dokou and Beverly Weber. They sent me articles and books and obtained bibliographic information. Many institutions helped to complete this study. The International Ernst Cassirer Society (Internationale Ernst Cassirer-Gesellschaft, Heidelberg) has informed me of recent publications and conferences in Germany. Mark Kille of the Houghton Library, Harvard University, sent me a description of the uncatalogued Susanne Langer papers. From the College Archivist at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut, I received a photograph of Langer. In response to my inquiry, Eric Hoffman of the American Philosophical Association informed me about a 1984 symposium on the philosophy of Susanne . Langer. Penelope Mathiesen, Director of Semiotics Publications, Indiana University, sent me a bibliography of Thomas Sebeok's writings, some of which were valuable for this study. I received articles from these Cassirer scholars: David Lovekin (Professor of Philosophy, Hastings College, NE), Donald Philip Verene (Charles Howard Candler Professor of Metaphysics and Moral Philosophy, Emory University), and John Michael Krois (Professor of Philosophy, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin). More indirectly, both Verene and Krois have helped by publishing Cassirer's works, by translating some, and by having written extensively on this philosopher and myth. A major posthumous text, the fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was edited and translated by them, and Krois has led the new xxi

xxii

Acknowledgments

series of Cassirer's works published by Felix Meiner Verlag, which he keeps me informed about. Krois also sent me a bibliography on Langer. Verene read the entire book and gave careful comments, but even more important has influenced this work by his many fine publications and teaching on Cassirer's works. The Garland staff have been helpful in our cooperation on the three books I published with them. Most of all, during the course of ten years when the first inquiry was made about a book on Cassirer's theory of myth, Robert Segal (The Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University) showed an interest and expertise for which I am grateful, as well as for the various reviews, articles, and books he sent. Finally, my wife Liana suggested alternatives that I would not have thought of and she sustained my morale through a project carried out over a long period.

CASSIRER AND L A N G E R ON M Y T H

This page intentionally left blank

PART I

Myth in Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 1

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career An Overview of Cassirer's Theory "Ernst Cassirer belongs to the great tradition of classical philosophy," DIMITRY GAWRONSKY (SCHILPP 34).

This chapter overviews Cassirer's extensive theory of myth because the number of writings and their difficulty would otherwise make its structure difficult to see without a long period of study. Also, it helps to orient readers who are unfamiliar with Cassirer's work and technical terms. While in the case of any writer it would be important to understand the context of a particular theory, in Cassirer's case it is especially important because it will be shown that he discusses myth in order to develop a broader philosophy, not the other way around. The information about his life does more than add some appealing color; it shows the reader how he came to be interested in myth, why he writes about modern myths in the way that he does (sometimes as if a stern prophet making a warning), and why he continued to be interested in it up until his death. THE FORMATIVE YEARS Sometimes a new idea comes to a brilliant thinker in a moment of insight, as Mrs. Toni Cassirer reports in My Life with Ernst Cassirer (my translation of Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer). One summer day in 1917, while going home from the University of Berlin, Ernst Cassirer walked through a streetcar doorway and stopped. Cassirer, 43, the philosopher with a high forehead made more prominent by the receding silver-grey hair, had studied human culture intensely for thirty years. Usually on these trips home he squeezed his way through the standing people, never himself attempting to take a seat, for there were many women with their children, older people, and war-injured men. He would stand and read a 3

4

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

book despite the traffic, the voices, the pushing, the babies' screams, the miserable lighting, the bad air. In the doorway this time, amid the pushing and the cacophany, he stopped. "Keep moving!" someone called. A moment passed. Someone asked, "Why did he stop?" The streetcar had to go. "Jawohl," Cassirer said as he moved on through the standing people to a small space where, as usual, he held the bar with one hand and a book with the other. But this time he left his book unopened. When he got home he told his wife Toni what had happened in the doorway. A plan had flashed before his mind's eye, an explosion of insight. The doorway of the streetcar, it seemed, was the doorway to a whole system of philosophy which took Cassirer ten years to write, comprised three volumes, and formed the ground stone for a body of published works totalling 11,380 pages before his death and more is being published posthumously (Verene, "Vico and Cassirer" 7). Cassirer called his plan "the philosophy of symbolic forms." As a preliminary definition, a "symbolic form" is a worldview or perspective made through a type of symbolism; the main "image worlds" (PSF II, 25) are myth, language, science, and art among others, to be discussed later. Though his ideas have not become popularized as have those of Joseph Campbell's— probably because of their scholarly style, Cassirer's ideas are fundamental to twentieth-century life, as we shall see at the end of this odyssey introducing his theory of myth. Although the insight came suddenly and apparently easily, actually the groundwork for his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was begun at least seven years earlier with the publishing of Substance and Function. In that work Cassirer criticized Georg Hegel, the nineteenth-century idealistic philosopher who thought he had found "absolute knowledge," meaning in non-technical terms a set of concepts that have the same meaning and are valid throughout history. Cassirer replaced the Hegelian permanent categories of experience with an historical set changing from culture to culture. Space, time, number, cause, self, and other categories would form different perspectives in different cultures. Hegel is wrong, Cassirer insisted, to claim that there can be unchanging categories, for then it becomes impossible to explain how they are used by changing human beings. A detailed technical discussion of the making of the mythic world view follows in subsequent chapters. Cassirer changed the direction of philosophy by relativizing knowledge into specific historical forms; they are cultural or symbolic forms

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career

5

such as myth, language, science. This first building block was clearly stated in 1910, when Einstein was working on his theory of relativity in physics. The parallel may not be mere coincidence; the similarity in their trends of thinking reveals an underlying trend which began our twentieth-century culture. Consider one particular similarity between the two theories. Einstein "relativized" space and time, though not completely, as he explained in his 1921 lecture in Hamburg: "According to the special theory of relativity, spatial coordinates and time still have an absolute character in so far as they are directly measurable by stationary clocks and bodies. But they are relative in so far as they depend on the state of motion of the selected inertial system" (ETR 446 ff). Thus, when Einstein wrote about the selected inertial system, he indicated the need to specify a system of reference for knowledge of nature. Picture a selected inertial system as a train moving quickly. To a person ahead of it, the train sounds different from what it does to a person behind it, and when the train passes an individual, the difference becomes quite noticeable as the change in the pitch of the horn. The place where a person stands made a difference in the quality of the phenomenon. So, too, Einstein claimed, with time. Previously, scientists believed that time for a person in the train coincided with time for a person observing the train. Einstein relativized time by claiming that the measurement of time was a function of place, speed, and other factors. Yet, in the same stroke, Einstein universalized the notion of time by integrating it with these factors, whereas previously scientists distinguished time as a separate kind of property. Cassirer's philosophy also implicitly employed the idea of a system of reference, and that is tremendously important, for it allowed him to theorize about all knowledge while relativizing it into particular forms, as Einstein relativized time while integrating it with sound and other phenomena to theorize about the whole system. Space and time retained their absolute character for Cassirer as basic concepts in all modes of experience. Nevertheless, these concepts, and many more, are relative to the particular type of activity and its historical context. Before a fuller discussion following this introduction, consider again the example of time. Every people in history has had a concept of time, though each has had a distinct conception. To the ancient Greeks, the people of 800 B.C. to 200 B.C., time was cyclical, festivals renewed the cycles of the heavens, and man gained some control over these cycles

6

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

by invoking gods who partially transcended them. In our technological society time is linear. Festivals do not renew the cycles of the universe— they merely break the monotonous line of time measured by the punch card at the office. People do not partially control time through rites, rather it is time that controls people by compartmentalizing life into study time, work time, and play time. Science, too, he argues has yet another idea of time. And, what is more, besides the fact of differing senses of time, there is the fact of a pattern of forming all ideas in any culture or area of culture. Einstein integrated time with other notions, Cassirer claimed that space, number, and cause varied along with time and exhibited a similar pattern of changes. He claimed that people of different cultures have different senses of space, time, number, and everything else. Einstein's theories constituted a revolution. They put an end to very basic goals of inquiry, an end to attempts at defining concepts such as the ether, and replaced them with new ones, like the idea of space-time that altered the course of physics itself. Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms is likewise a revolution. Scholars in all fields have increasingly acknowledged the influence of Cassirer's views, and Cassirer met some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and some much-discussed intellectual figures point out the significance of Cassirer's work. When Einstein gave the Hamburg lecture on the theory of relativity (1921), Cassirer was present. Cassirer talked to Einstein, asking him to clarify some ideas. Cassirer had already finished his own monograph, Einstein 's Theory of Relativity Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint In it he discussed the theory not as an expression of the most true theory of space and time ever developed but rather as the most recent expression of the scientific way of thinking. Other modes of structuring space and time, such as through art or history, have an integral role in culture. Cassirer's work emphasizes the importance of Einstein's conclusions for Cassirer's theory of knowledge. Cassirer's philosophy was as current and as revolutionary as Einstein's physics. What made Cassirer's work revolutionary was the new principle of unity which he sought and developed, a unity that relativized knowledge into cultural forms while allowing the philosopher to see their ultimate unity. What was the unity of culture? Two years after the revolutionary insight on the streetcar, when Cassirer became a professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg, he attempted to understand the unity of culture by studying its many subjects—as many as he could. He knew enough about science to write about Einstein and to talk with him, at a

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career

7

time when few scientists understood relativity. He knew classical opera well enough to hum melodies. He knew enough languages to sing the words of those operas in different tongues. He knew current stock exchange prices. He knew sports results. He delighted in the strategies of chess. It is not surprising that this versatile man was elected Rector of the University of Hamburg, a position requiring its holder to speak on many different subjects. THE FIRST AND MOST DEVELOPED STAGE These studies in so many fields led to Cassirer's philosophical quest and to the first of three stages in his definition of myth. To realize the vision he had had on the streetcar, Cassirer began to write his three-volume system of philosophy, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (now four because of a posthumous volume). When not giving public lectures to large audiences, he studied intensely at the famous private library compiled by Avy Warburg, a library which amazed him because its uncommon association of subjects matched the uncommon association of cultural ideas Cassirer was currently developing. Books on myth, art, and religion appeared next to each other, while it had been customary to regard myth and religion as very different phenomena. For example, Hegel considered religion to be very close in cultural development to his idea of absolute knowledge, but he hardly discussed myth—having begun his theory of knowledge on a level above myth, a level on which perception had airead superceded the mythical perception of things as emotive qualities. In the Warburgh Library linguistic studies appeared next to those in history. So too, the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms presented language as a basic function of mind also required in historical studies. Language, Cassirer said, is representation; it builds up the world of intuition, the world of action, the common sense world of things with attributes. A word with its aggregate meanings reflects symbolically a thing with its attributes. The second volume presented a theory of myth as the first mode of human existence, from which art and religion develop. This theory of myth is highly original, for Cassirer viewed myth as having its own inner "logic"; a degree and type of coherence among conceptions and of correspondence between ideas and the world. It had been the traditional view to regard myths as fanciful creations like dreams or the ravings of mad men; as conscious products made up like fairy tales to have a moral; as nearly incoherent babblings, naive or mistaken stories to be rejected

8

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

entirely. In contrast, Cassirer showed myth has an inner logic or form: all the ideas of mythical societies exhibit a pattern, or common way, of relating to each other. They interweave and relate to the world in the same way. The third volume, The Phenomenology of Knowledge (1929), differs from the preceding two volumes because it does not concentrate on one cultural phenomenon, though science is predominant. It discusses the long development throughout human civilization of myth into science or in more general terms the development of one cultural form into another. THE SECOND AND THIRD STAGES In the long, difficult third volume on the theory of knowledge, there are the second and third stages of his theory of myth. He postulates, again on the basis of much empirical cultural research, two very unique concepts, which change his understanding of myth. They are so unique that they have no correlates in a nonphilosophical vocabulary. This brief synoptic description introduces these ideas in their broadest context so as to make the detailed discussion in later chapters more understandable. In the second stage of his theory of myth, he explains how myth has a permanent role throughout human civilization. In the first stage Cassirer extensively defines what myth is. This definition and the definition of other symbolic forms lead him to the conclusion that common sense and science develop beyond the ability of mythical thinkers. If myth developed into science, was myth completely left behind like the used fuel boosters jettisoned by a manned space capsule? Could there be a culture without myth? If so his idea of the necessary and universal role of each cultural form would be wrong. Yet science does know more about the world and in a more reliable way. The solution is to claim that some ability that was first present in myth continues beyond the primitive level of life and can be increased and changed. In more technical terms, myth's function continues but its form is no longer the dominant or even exclusive ordering principle of experience. The idea of a universal function is somewhat subtle because Cassirer formulated it in a highly original and characteristically philosophical way—one in which myth played the key role. In the second stage of his theory, more than halfway through the three-volume magnum opus on culture, Cassirer concludes that myth cannot be overcome or eradicated from any culture completely (a view Tillich and Eliot have or religion). In the third stage, at the end of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career

9

Cassirer again makes a major conclusion about myth: it has in it an ideal of development that is also shared by science and other activities. True enough, the ideal is not exactly the same in primitive and modern society. He feels he must assert such a principle as a way to explain the continuity of civilization. Even in myth there are formed principles of unity which lead to even greater ones. It is a well documented fact that myths tend to merge and to lead to a single myth of the universe as in the preSocratic philosophers. Rather than believing that this fact shows the nascent scientific interest in myth, Cassirer interprets it to mean that the mythic way of unifying a world recurs again but at a higher level and in cooperation with other ones in post-primitive societies. Another way to say this is that the characteristic and abiding function of myth is capable of indefinite improvement. This idea is consistent with Susanne Langer's notion that all ideas pass through a metaphorical stage before achieving a logical one, which only leads to new metaphors; this process is cyclical but progressive (See Philosophy in a New Key). The idea that explains the recurrence and progressive nature of myth is the "ideal limit." The ideal limit marks the third and final main stage in his theory of myth. At last it gives him, the philosopher, a total vision of human culture—past, present, and future. Human tendencies found in the first cultures are repeated, changed, and improved and will be more in the future. Cassirer's theory of culture has universal principles which apply to every culture not entirely unlike the principles in physics, which are meant to apply universally to all things. THE APPLICATION OF THE THEORY TO MODERN LIFE During the year the third volume of his original system was published (1929), Cassirer's philosophical search for the unity of culture stopped at a major depot. Events in Cassirer's life forced him to understand them through his theory of myth and eventually to write about its application to modern life in The Myth of the State. He met Martin Heidegger, at that time known as a student of Edmund Husserl who had recently published his own major treatise, Being and Time. The Cassirer-Heidegger meeting was held in Davos, Germany, between March 17 and April 6, 1929. The meeting was to be a seminar, and, since both men were becoming preeminent intellectual figures, the seminar drew international attention. This meeting of the minds was to foreshadow the main themes of Cassirer's idea of modern political myths.

10

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Toni Cassirer, Cassirer's wife, attended the two-man seminar in the feudal Swedish hotel. She saw many scholars from France, Italy, Holland, Austria, and what seemed to her the whole of Germany. Though the meeting was announced as a seminar, Toni Cassirer was apprehensive that it might become a confrontation. For the two philosophers differed greatly. Cassirer, the three-piecesuit scholar, wrote simply and clearly; Heidegger, who wore an unfashionable suit when others wore tuxedos, wrote in an abstruse almost private language. Amid the growing anti-semitic tensions in Germany, Heidegger was reputed to be antisemitic. Toni had heard this, as she reports in her book Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer and she wondered if problems would arise for her Jewish husband. Heidegger was publicly hostile and rude toward NeoKantians, while Cassirer had studied with Herman Cohen, the leader of the Marburg NeoKantians, and was a good friend of his. Indeed, already Heidegger had criticized Cassirer's interpretation of Kant severely. Would the meeting become a battle? At the first meeting of the event, a dinner, Toni Cassirer was ready in her own way. She did not understand Heidegger's or her husband's philosophical ideas, she professed. She had not studied Heidegger's works in preparation for the discussion, as Cassirer had done. However, she had found out all she could about Heidegger the man. Hoping to get to know him, to understand him, and to get an idea of what would follow or in retrospect of what it would mean, she sat next to his assigned place. The dinner started. She reviewed the facts: Heidegger was hostile toward NeoKantians, hostile toward Cassirer's Kant interpretation, reputedly anti-semitic, and customarily late. Thus, others were not surprised when towards the end of the dinner the door opened to reveal a shy, underdressed man with dark, piercing eyes—intense eyes. Expecting some hostility, she became pleased when at the end of the dinner Heidegger had not made any unpleasant remarks. Perhaps the rumors were wrong, the facts exaggerated. During the first lecture in the series the two philosophers compared ideas cordially. Then Cassirer became sick. And all those people had come! Heidegger continued presenting his ideas, alone, and with noticeable disappointment, daily communicating the lecture's contents to his recovering colleague. After Cassirer's recovery, Cassirer and Heidegger resumed their discussions on the proposed theme of human nature. They disagreed on the most basic issues. Cassirer objected to Heidegger's philosophical method, claiming that philosophy should begin with empirical studies

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career

11

and then should develop general ideas. Heidegger, by contrast, began with general ideas and then sought conclusions about factual matters. For most people, this is the stereotype or caricature of a philosopher. With different methods they formed different ideas about human nature. Heidegger defined a human being as a "Dasein," a there-being, a beingthere, a being positioned in a world. Cassirer objected to this view because the definition ignored the freedom to change as is manifest in cultural change. His view claims that a man in ancient Egypt related to the world differently than a man relates to the world via Toledo, Ohio, today, while Heidegger does not define any differences. Although the discussions were cordial, Toni observed, there was no genuine rapport between the two men. They used the same words and yet it was as if their meanings still differed. The discussions were odd. The styles of the two philosophers, Carl Hamburg noticed, were reversed at the Davos seminar, like a mirror image. Usually, Cassirer gave arguments in great detail and with many references to cultural studies as well as classical authors. Usually, Cassirer exemplified his new ideas by finding parallels or prototypes in intellectual history. Usually, Cassirer restated his arguments until his argument became clear and convincing. However, at Davos he reached a point where further discussion seemed pointless. While Heidegger wanted to discuss the classics and their interpretation, Cassirer pointed to the future. He was attempting to cooperate with Heidegger in determining new directions for philosophy. Heidegger was cooperative but the two philosophers did not look in the same direction. Their differences stand out most clearly as ethical. Heidegger believed that people are "thrown" into the world: theat their lives are bound to the issues of existence, such as death. People find themselves in a place and a time, in a society and in a particular destiny. Cassirer, to a much greater degree, asserted the idea of human freedom from life circumstances. Human life can reject its circumstances or through cultural works change them—namely through the ethical duty of the philosopher to society. This theoretical difference is manifest in the actions of the two philosophers. In April of 1933 Cassirer resigned as Rector at the University of Hamburg. The newspapers reported the resignation as stemming from personal reasons. Cassirer was furious, first at the University's administration, secondly at the newspapers. The reasons were "personal" only in the sense that he did not want to participate in an intellectual community which began to discharge and mistreat its Jewish faculty. In a letter to the Department of Higher Education he claimed his reasons

12

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

were ethical. They could have become personal in a sense, too; for Cassirer was a Jew. Would he be the next to go? What might they do to him? While Cassirer renounced these circumstances of political climate, by resigning his post, by making his indignation public, and by leaving Germany forever in May of 1933, Heidegger stayed in Hamburg. Just as Heidegger believed that people are "thrown" into the world—a passive construction indicating lack of freedom and action, Heidegger was thrown into the Rectorship which Cassirer had resigned! The Rector, who addresses the academy and the community, represents the actions and policies of the University and thus serves as spokesperson. Writing as if in retrospect about Heidegger Cassirer expressed deep concern about Oswald Spengler's fatalism in his Decline of the West, a trait of mythical thought to succumb to destiny, to renounce one's responsibility to choose, and to divine a future rather than determine it (291 MS). As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, Heidegger's philosophy is either a myth or a fashion (Phenomenology of Perception vii). From Cassirer's standpoint, Heidegger's philosophy is dark and deterministic, and this was his stance toward the world in his life. Outside Germany, Cassirer continued what he called an intellectual "odyssey." At first in his career he had written about very abstract issues discussed only by professionaal philsophers and scientists. Then, before he had met Heidegger, he had begun concrete analyses of cultural studies in art and anthropology, in myth and religion, in language and science. To Cassirer, Heidegger represented philosophy as dark abstractions. After the meeting Cassirer continued to reject technical abstractions, in favor of concrete cultural ideas; however, there was a constant trend until the end of his life: increasingly less emphasis on formal theories and more on actual human, social and political life. Leaving Germany heightened Cassirer's interest in ethics, for he was soon to write on ethics, later on politics. Now, like Odysseus, he moved often. First, he went to Oxford College, where he lectured from 1933 to 1935. Though he could only read Engish when he arrived, within three months he was lecturing in it. In September of 1933, he, his wife, and two of their children, Heinz and Anne, moved at night by chauffeur to Goteborg. Cassirer had accepted a chair on the condition that no present faculty member be dismissed to make room for him. Georg could not be with them. German emigration laws restricted the number of Jews leaving. This situation reminded Cassirer of the events leading to his departure in May of 1933. As a philosopher he developed ideas and also, now very important, he had ethical

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career

13

obligations. During he next six years in Sweden he wrote on physics and ethics: one book on the degree of determinacy which principles have in physics, the second on a Swedish philosopher's axiomatic ethics. The last phase of his philosophy and his life was spent in America, where as culture heros do they must return to the society of everyday life which they had left only to share their acquired wisdom. It is in this phase that Cassirer puts his ideas about myth in modern life, especially political, into prose. While lecturing at Yale to graduate students, Cassirer wrote the fourth of his five major philosophical works—An Essay on Man (1944). Cassirer's American friends had requested him to translate The Philosophy of Symbolic forms for them, but he decided to present its ideas in a new work, not only because The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms was a long treatise (the new one would be shorter) but because he was rethinking some of the topics discussed fifteen years earlier. An Essay on Man is an illustration of his philosophy rather than a demonstration and to many it may seem to be only an easy short summary of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Abstract metaphysical principles are absent; instead he defines what he regards as six major cultural activities or symbolic forms: art, science, language, history, myth, and religion. What is new in An Essay on Man is an increasing drive to bring philosophy closer to life, and he does this in two ways: first, he cites new empirical research in a range of sciences which better support his earlier views; secondly, he speaks directly though briefly about the mission of philosophy for an individual's life and for the good of society. For the individual, philosophy offers self-knowledge and liberation. Then the individual can become more self-determining and individually ethical. The individual becomes liberated from astrology, obsession with alien creatures, prejudice, racism, political radicalisms, superstition, cult religions and from other lower forms of knowledge limiting consciousness or the size and depth of perspective one has on the world. On behalf of society, philosophy, the search for the fundamental unity of all cultural forms, needs to counteract the fragmenting trends of modern life. Marx first noticed how fragmented the lives of industrial workers were and how alienated they became. A time for work, a time to eat, a time to sleep, a time to learn, and a time to play—all these distinctions may seem innocuous. Today restaurants offer "happy hours," so that customers will have a specific time to be happy. The harm of fragmentation to human well-being is quite visible in the satisfaction or lack of satisfaction industrial workers get from their jobs. Work becomes divorced from play; workers are separated to make talking with each other

14

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

impossible. The worker makes only one portion of a product, the whole of which he never sees, a satisfaction craftsmen once had. Fragmentation through industrialized life makes human life serve ends that do not give either immediate satisfaction or long-term fulfillment. These examples are known to many people. Yet in An Essay on Man Cassirer sees a "Crisis in Man's Knowledge of Himself." This title for the first chapter indicates that fragmentation pervades intellectual, academic work just as much as it pervades industry and business. Today special separate disciplines threaten to fragment man's view of himself, his self-knowledge. Philosophy, which originated as the search for wisdom and with it the good life, has specialized into philosophies of language, mind, science, mathematics, art, man, technology, religion, and logic. Once called the "Olympian" because he knew so much in many fields, Cassirer most noticeably in An Essay on Man counteracts this undesirable fragmentation—as undesirable as a neurological disease in which different muscles and organs cannot communicate with one another. An Essay on Man is the philosophic attempt to seek a whole vision of human life by treating six of its major areas as distinct though essential integrals of human life. An Essay on Man appeared in 1944, the same year that Cassirer and his family moved to new York where he would teach at Columbia University. There he prepared the manuscript of The Myth of the State, a book describing the mythical structure of twentieth century political life. In his customary way Cassirer presents the cultural background for and origins of the problem: why did twentieth-century political life, supposedly as civilized as scientific sophistication, become so barbaric? The political life he examines is that of Nazi Germany, whose barbarism he timely avoided. The Myth of the State correlates the logic of Nazi Germany with the logic of myth. It points out that the Nazi leaders differ from primitives; the modern "savages" consciously created myths to control the German people, whereas the ancient savages did not consciously create myths as means to ends. Propaganda was not necessary in the less scientific world of ancient Babylonia, and the hardships of the German people made them desperate enough to accept strong measures which promised through myths of German superiority to fulfill their collective wishes. Unfortunately, Cassirer could not see The Myth of the State through to publication. On April 13, 1945, after playing chess in the morning as he often did, he began to make his way off campus, when he was asked a question by his student Arthur Pap. Cassirer turned to answer, but col-

Myth in Cassirer's Life and Career

15

lapsed dead in Pap's arms. Thus his intellectual Odyssey ended—or perhaps he left it for his students to continue. In The Myth of the State Cassirer applies his view of myth. He does not develop new philosophical hypotheses as he did in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms—he does not change his conception of myth as he did in the previous stages—byt he develops a more complete vision of myth in human existence by applying philosophy to human life and by understanding myth in ethical, normative terms. Although his philosophy is not a guide to life, it has a role to play in human affairs, a role that does not imply direct political participation or social activism; rather it implies a philosophical understanding of the current state of affairs, an understanding which then makes possible a rational alternative to the actual situation. In this approach, there is an ideal of freedom to direct human behaviour ethically, as Cassirer actually did in May of 1933 when he left Germany after sensing the forthcoming nightmare. For Cassirer, philosophy has the role of preserving this freedom—it does not just have an optional role, but a duty. Some thinkers would gladly relinquish this duty and resign themselves to serving destiny, a prison sentence for the human spirit, as Heidegger did by remaining in Nazi Germany. Unlike Heidegger, Cassirer asserts the importance of philosophy in creating the human situation, while denying that philosophy can change reality by an act of thought. What philosophy can do is make the real situation understood so that people become aware of their ethical possibilities. In The Myth of the State, Cassirer describes the real situation of twentieth-century political life in which myth arose as a demonic power in Nazi Germany. Philosophy, he claims, does not have the power to destroy political myths; it does have the power to let us see through them, and seeing through myth makes possible a rational course of action to change the situation (MS 296). Cassirer's ethical approach to philosophy preserves human freedom, or what makes life human. Perhaps the best depiction of Cassirer's personal style appears in a picture taken at the 1941 Eastern Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, when Cassirer was 67. Caught by a camera in a three-piece suit, with hands too low to be in view, Cassirer stands expressionless, looking straight ahead toward the viewer—no body tension, no smile, no frown. The lined, intense face is white, though not as white as the hair swept straight back exposing a high forehead above faint eyebrows. The figure, with his large ears and small self-absorbed eyes, is a disembodied spirit, only partially incarnate, with whom the viewer does not seem to be able to make eye contact. Cassirer is not

16

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

spiritually at the site of the picture-taking; his mind is not confined to that particular event. It looks as if Cassirer achieved an ideal and comprehensive vision of human life—an ideal limit. Cassirer's philosophy has such a breadth of learning and depth of detached knowledge that it constitutes a grand classical system of philosophy in the manner of Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel. This overview of Cassirer's life and work serves to set an interpretative context for the subsequent detailed discussions of the three main stages of his theory of myth. In these stages he learns that myth is a worldview (a symbolic form), that it has within it a permanent human power (a universal function), and that it has in it tendencies that can be indefinitely improved (an ideal limit). With the theory completed, Cassirer turns to ethical issues of myth in modern life—more an application than a turning point in his theory. The next chapter examines the origin and general plan of his whole philosophy, for it explains why he chooses to theorize about myth and in what way he does so.

CHAPTER 2

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture Assumptions, Methods, and Goals "A Theory of myth is, however, from the beginning laden with difficulties. Myth is nontheoretical in its very meaning and essence. It defies and challenges our fundamental categories of thought. Its logic—if there is any logic—is incommensurate with all our conceptions of empirical or scientific truth. But philosophy could never admit such a bifurcation. It was convinced that the creations of the myth-making function must have a philosophical, an understandable 'meaning'. If myth hides this meaning under all sorts of images and symbols, it became the task of philosophy to unmask it" (EM 73). How important is Cassirer's theory? What are its general features? What can philosophy explain that other fields such as anthropology cannot? Is it possible to philosophize about myth? Do Cassirer's methods and answers differ from those of other philosophers? What is the plan of his philosophy as a whole? Why does myth become the first and crucial topic in his philosophy? GENERAL FEATURES The following statements of praise declare the importance of Cassirer's philosophy while describing general features that a person would first want to know. "A prodigious worker, an erudite scholar, and a profound thinker, he [Cassirer] has practically no peer at the present time as a universal philosopher, so that when the magazine Fortune, publishing in its latest issue one of Cassirer's articles, represented him as 'not only one of the

17

18

Cassirer and Langer on Myth greatest living philosophers but one of the great historians of philosophy', it was hardly overstating Cassirer's position" (A.A. Roback).1 "Cassirer is the only major philosopher of the twentieth century to develop a philosophy of mythology and to base a total theory of knowledge in it. His theory of myth is the most original part of his philosophy" (Donald Philip Verene).2 "Ernst Cassirer, who devoted more time and thought to the philosophy of myth than anyone else . . ." (G.S. Kirk).3 "I am especially drawn to Cassirer because his theory of myth stands as one of the most ambitious and erudite examples of that enterprise" (Ivan Strenski)4 "With his basic insight into the indispensable formative activity of the human spirit, Cassirer offers a recurrent and effective rebuttal of various forms of mere empiricism, sensationism, associationism, and behaviorism. In particular, several features of Cassirer's work deserve serious attention. His treatment of mythic consciousness as one of the great modes of human thought is stimulating, and affords an interesting complement to the descriptive-phenomenological accounts which are common in works of comparative religion" (William A. Van Roo).5 "One of the great philosophical interpreters of human civilization" (Hajo Holborn).6 "We were impressed by the depth and variety of his knowledge. The depth we were prepared for, but the variety amazed us. I recall that, after I had seen An Essay On Man, I asked two members of the department [of Philosophy at Columbia] whether Professor Cassirer were really at home in all the varied fields surveyed by this book. They assured me that, in truth, he was" (Edward Murray).7 "In the Neo-Kantian philosophy of Ernst Cassirer we have the most significant attempt of modern times to construct a philosophy of myth as an integral part of a philosophy of culture" (David Bidney).8

From these statements representative of many other scholars as well, the following general features are evident. His work on myth is a major or important attempt, perhaps even the major one in the twentieth century by a philosopher—as has been expressed in the work of Donald Verene and others. It is original and, I might add, by creating new explanatory concepts from philosophy. It is positive about myth, rather than negative and so in opposition to the giving of a full explanation. It is quite detailed and extensive in scope, a feature setting it apart from many other philosophical interpretations of myth; erudite (using many sources from dif-

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

19

ferent fields); well-supported by the empirical and social sciences, expert in the handling of various special disciplines, and comprehensive since it places myth in a total philosophy of culture and so interprets its general significance. What is more, in later chapters, scholars will declare the ethical nature of this work on myth and its relevance to life. Notwithstanding the extremely positive prevailing reputation of Cassirer's work, there are some criticisms, the main ones of which will be presented when they are helpful to explain his ideas. More specific questions can now be discussed about Cassirer's own method—which may seem to run counter to empiricism and logical positivism as Van Roo pointed out and which will now be explained. I do not think Cassirer's views are anti-empirical or anti-logical; rather they are of an alternative type combining and supplementing those two approaches. REJECTION OF NONPHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS Examining Cassirer's rejection of other views on myth can help to define what his view is, although they may not help prove his view. The Limited Value of the Comparison of Theories of Myth from Different Fields Myth studies are so rich with possibilities and so new, relative to other university curricula, that there is no consensus about the object of study, the methods, nor the purposes. Consequently, there is an unacknowledged problem comparing the views of scholars in different fields. Although comparisons are common, it should not be assumed that the same type of concepts are being compared; that is to say, for example, people never compare a poem about World War I with a painting of it to see which one is more historically accurate and therefore the better work of art. Yet, the same difference in the criteria of value should obtain when comparing the views of philosophers and other scholars, regardless of whether their medium of presentation appears to be the same in both cases—verbal—and regardless of whether the object seems to be the same—myth. The attempt to refute an argument in one field by that of another is the logical mistake of applying the principles of one thing to those of another which belongs to a different category: it is catalogued by Aristotle who calls it the "transition to a new category" ("metábasis eis allo génos"; see ETR 450 where Cassirer refers to the mistake by its

20

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Greek name). If the views from different fields were directly comparable as to their truth value, soon enough university administrators would realize the theoretical wisdom in eliminating the wrong fields or combining departments to eliminate the duplicated work. The absurd result serves to highlight the belief in specific autonomous domains for the fields of research. Even though the views from different fields are not directly comparable as to their truth value, the comparing of views produced by heterogeneous methods can serve to suggest analogous concepts in a new field. Cassirer does compare his philosophical ideas about myth with those of other fields, yet it is clear he does so in order to define his view by contrast, not to prove it through a logical refutation of a view from another discipline. It is not possible to decide whether Cassirer or some anthropologist is more correct using the same criteria for both fields. It is true that both may seem to talk about the same object; strictly speaking, it is not the same. For example both psychology and sociology may discuss a child's behaviour in school, yet they do so with different aims of inquiry and different methods so that that behaviour becomes defined differently as it enters into a necessarily different network of ideas the character of which as the network expands becomes increasingly psychological or sociological in character. On a small scale it is difficult to see this point, for it wrongly seems that the "same" phenomenon" is at issue. Each discipline, however, the more systematic the knowledge the more it transforms whatever data it acquires into objects of its own making, as when science transforms sensed properties of the natural elements into definitions of the element in a series of the Periodic Table of Elements. One approach to myth quite different from Cassirer's is that by members of Classics departments, who tend to make their analyses increasingly specific and to multiply the details instead of forming a few general principles of synthesis. G.S. Kirk, Professor of Classics, University of Cambridge, thinks no universal theory of myth is possible: "The need for a coherent treatment of these and related problems, and one that is not concerned simply to propagate a particular universalistic theory (the very notion of which is in my opinion chimerical), seems undeniable" (Preface V). He emphatically asserts in diametrical opposition to Cassirer's approach, "myths do not have a single form" (2). Even though Cassirer does not react directly to Kirk's objection to universal theories of myth, he does assert the need for a universal approach. These arguments are presented in several of the pages of this

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

21

chapter. However, the proper way to arbitrate between the two types of approach is to recognized that they do not have the same purposes in mind so that no agreement could ever be expected. Kirk is concerned with describing, perhaps interpreting the empirical details, and he does so with clearness and analytical ability. In contrast, Cassirer begins with interpreted data and tries to understand them through principles of synthesis which they seem to the philosopher to assume. "For it is not a question," Cassirer writes, "of what we see in a certain perspective, but of the perspective itself (LM 11). Kirk does not attempt to define a perspective. He admits the possibility of several mythical perspectives without ever defining what makes any of those perspectives. This lack is not exactly a mistake, since he does not attempt to define a perspective. Another non-universalistic approach is by Eliade, who compiles a greater wealth of data on a particular culture because he is not a Classicist studying primarily verbal products but an Anthropologist studying all aspects of a culture to state their interrelationships. In the statement of his aim it becomes clear how it does not attempt to find general principles suggested in the patterns of details: "The rites and beliefs here grouped under 'Regeneration of Time' afford an endless variety, and we are under little illusion as to the possibility of fitting them into a coherent and unified system. In any case, the present essay requires neither an exposition of all the forms this regeneration assumes nor a morphological and historical analysis of them. Our aim is not to learn how the calendar came to be constituted, nor to discover how far it might be possible to work out a system that would comprehend the conceptions of the 'year' held by various peoples" (The Myth of the Eternal Return 51). The main nonphilosophical interpretations discussed by Cassirer are those of Freud, The French sociological school, including Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim, and allegorical interpretations in general. He often refers to the writings of Malinowski and other researchers to show the partial source of his view, to give evidence, or to illustrate his view. To epitomize the strategy in his objections, he writes, . . . the unity of myth is in constant danger of losing itself in some particular, which is then accepted as a satisfactory solution. Whether this particular turns out to be a class of natural objects, a specific cultural sphere, or a psychological force is essentially indifferent. For in all these cases the desired unity is transposed into elements when it should be sought in the characteristic form which produces from these elements a new spiritual whole, a world of symbolic meaning. Critical

22

Cassirer and Langer on Myth epistemology, looks on knowledge—with all the infinite diversity of the objects toward which it is directed and of the psychological forces with which it operates—as an ideal whole, the universal constitutive conditions of which it seeks, and the same approach applies to every spiritual unity of meaning (PSF II, 20).

I could emphasize the gist by saying, those views are wrong because they are not philosophical, because they do not try to find fundamental principles of unity but instead try to understand myth apart from other forms of knowing. In this passage the tone is not exactly one indicating the pointing out of error; rather it is more explanatory insofar as he uses the differences in views to define his own. The same passage continues and states a new and philosophical approach, one attempting to find the unity of the creative process of myth (See EM 70). In the last analysis this unity must be established not in a genetic and causal but in a teleological sense as a direction followed by consciousness in constructing spiritual reality. Regardless of whether we gain an understanding of its genesis and regardless of what view we take of this genesis, the reality that is produced in the end stands before us as a self-contained configuration with a being and meaning of its own. (PSF II, 20).

Noteworthy here is the tentative, partial definition of myth as "a direction followed by consciousness in constructing spiritual reality." This direction leads to others and they in turn to others and in the end Cassirer presents a comprehensive view of the evolution of knowledge in civilization. EVALUATION OF PREVIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL EXPLANATIONS This idea of the unity of myth is the point of disagreement and agreement with the main philosophical approaches to myth preceding Cassirer's work. The first one to mention would be F.W. von Schelling's Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth (Einleitung in die Philosophie der Mythologie, 1856). Though fully in agreement with Schelling's nonallegorical interpretation, Cassirer disagrees with the metaphysical unity of

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

23

myth derived from an absolute (PSF II, 4 and 9). He agrees with Giambattista Vico, whom he claims "founded a completely new philosophy of mythology" on the idea that the unity of culture depended on the unity of myth as a definite kind of worldview (PSF II, 3). A third "philosophical" approach to myth was by F. Max Müller who, in an appendix to a work on comparative mythology, claimed myth was an aberration of language and so in Cassirer's terms did not have unity as a type of the objectifying of experience into a worldview (PSF II, 21-22; EM 109). In the posthumous work The Myth of the State he discusses the role of ancient Greek philosophy in separating itself from myth and in serving as its critic. This discussion highlights the unity of myth because philosophy is seen as not being able to coexist peacefully with myth; their conceptions are at odds, as in Plato's criticism of the "poetries" of Homer and Hesiod, among others, which do not give a unified, nor consistently ethical conception of the gods. In fact, the famous quarrel between philosophy and poetry may not actually be between two different fields but may be Plato's figurative way of saying that the philosophy attempted by Hesiod and Homer were not as "scientific" as Plato's and by comparison were merely "poetic."

THE GENERAL DIFFICULTY WITH PHILOSOPHIZING ABOUT MYTH Is It Irrational and So Unexplainable? Why is myth a problem for the philosopher? This can mean either that it perhaps cannot be done by the philosopher or that it is a task to be done. Can philosophy use its methods on such a seemingly irrational topic? How? Part of the problem is pinpointed by James Lawrence Cole when he writes, "Cassirer begins the book by assuming that there is a 'world of myth'. The only methodological problem raised is whether or not this 'world' is of the kind that can be studied by the techniques of critical anaylsis. Whether there is a world or how it is to be defined is not even asked" (Review of PSF II, 251). How intelligible is the world of myth? Is myth rational enough to tell us about the world? Philosophy traditionally has avoided many categories of irrational phenomena such as dreams, insanity, and perhaps myth. Pertinent to this discussion is the fact that some forms of insanity have been described as

24

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

the absence of meaning or its fragmentation rather than a distorted though meaningful response to which there is a talking therapy and pharmaceutical relief of symptoms. Cassirer's basic answer is positive—philosophy can make a theory of myth because if it could not there would be an unbridgeable gap in a comprehensive theory of knowledge between mistaken pre-rational thought (myth) and the current rational experience we all supposedly enjoy today (EM 72-73). The possibility of understanding myth depends on it having in it some processes that are still active today, though they could be changed (EM 77). Other Methodological Problems Another problem, which he is acutely aware of, is the interpretation of something unfamiliar by transforming it into familiar terms. Donald Verene thinks Giambatista Vico understood this idea better than Cassirer ("Vico and Cassirer," 10). Does myth become understood or does it become partially changed into something that was already understood? An example of this mistake occurs in Hans Blumenberg's Work on Myth: "Myth, then, does not speak of the beginning of the world, any more than it speaks of its being bounded by Oceanus, which as the boundary river would after all have to have another bank as well" (128). Blumenberg believes no one seriously thinks there is a primordial past, a time before which there was none (PSF II, 105-06). But the idea of a linear time, one moment after another is a relatively late development in human history. Blumenberg, like some other scholars, especially early ones, does not take myth seriously as a different kind of worldview. Instead, primitives are either criminal, deranged, or playful versions of ourselves, depending upon the behavior one happens to be trying to explain—in Blumenberg's case, "explaining away" so that there is nothing really to explain or no explanation given. If myths could not be explained, then they could only be experienced. Robert Segal discusses this problem and notices that Joseph Campbell sometimes starts to think in this latter way (JC 82). Is mere experience a way of understanding or can it be interpretation? Still, how would the modern mind experience myth without the interference of much more developed modes of knowing? Cassirer's solution avoiding the extremes of the lack of a possible explanation or the inevitability of a distorted explanation is, in John E. Smith's words, "a principle of autonomy according to which every form is to be understood in and through itself (480-81). Cassirer writes,

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

25

. . . this objectivity [of myth] lies neither in a metaphysical nor in an empirical-psychological 'reality' which stands behind it, but in what myth itself is and achieves, in the manner and form of objectivization which it accomplishes. It is objective insofar as it is recognized as one of the determining factors by which consciousness frees itself from passive captivity in sensory impression and creates a world of its own in accordance with a spiritual principle. If we formulate the question in this sense, the 'unreality' of the mythical world can no longer be said to argue against its significance and truth . . . in connection with myth, we can only raise the question of objectivity in the sense of inquiring whether it discloses an immanent rule, a characteristic 'necessity'. True, we seem limited to an objectivity of low degree . . . (PSF II, 14).

Certainly, Cassirer defends the right of philosophy to theorize about myth because it has its own mode of "objectivization" or making of an object in a world, and as such it belongs with other modes of doing this, albeit more developed ones. By establishing a hierarchy in the evolution of knowledge, he believes he can render the meaning of myth as faithfully as possible—for the differences from our mode of knowing become explicit. It is important to remember, too, that an exact 'copy' of mythical meaning is not a legitimate aim in his view; we should not want to and cannot become entirely mythical. We do not want to explain myth with the aim in mind that we would then know it so well that we could see everything in the world with primitive eyes. Instead, the philosopher can use empirical data to create a piece of a puzzle; the piece is myth and the puzzle is a theory of the evolution of all forms of knowledge throughout history. Both the piece and the puzzle are uniquely philosophical creations, in the same way that a painter makes a painting and a musician makes a musical work. In Cassirer's words, "Then we could have a systematic philosophy of human culture in which each particular form would take its meaning solely from the place in which it stands, a system in which the content and significance of each form would be characterized by the richness and specific quality of the relations and concatenations in which it stands with other spiritual energies and ultimately with totality" (PSF I, 82). The purpose of a philosophical "explanation" of myth would be to disclose universal laws of human nature to us so that they could point the way to our development as they pointed the way to primitives in an analogous way. In this way, the purpose of explaining myth is not to become a primitive, not to be able to tell a primitive how to be one better, but to tell us about ourselves, indirectly but surely.

26

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Cassirer Adapts Empirical Studies to His Purposes Unlike the tradition of continental philosophy before him, Cassirer uses empirical data from the various fields of learning to guide the development of his general theory of knowledge. He does not himself gather any data, and for this reason Strenski called a philosophy of myth a "secondorder" process of commenting on empirical research (363); nor is Cassirer concerned very much in many of the questions that other scholars pose when they think of the problem of mythology. He does not want to create a definition of myth so that it can be easily applied to any phenomenon and able to distinguish the mythical from the nonmythical. The logical difficulties in such a project can be understood if one remembers Aristotle's definition of the human as a featherless biped or more recent problems in drawing a line between life and death throughout all natural phenomena. Cassirer also does not want to classify myths into different types perhaps based on their subjects or some other criteria. He is not amazed to sense some underlying unity of the multifarious mythical phenomena as Joseph Campbell was when he asked, "Why is mythology everwhere the same, beneath its varieties of costume? And what does it teach?"9 Cassirer expected to find an underlying unity. He does not want to determine the actual historical development of myths into one another, though he does use some evidence about this subject for his different, more general goal (EM 69). Cassirer is not concerned with many other empirical issues about myth. He does not ask about the empirical genesis (PSF II, 20); this could mean that a change in brain structure caused the rise of myth, but he does discuss differences between animal and human behavior not to define a causal transition but to define human mentality by contrast with a type belonging to a different genus. Cassirer does not ask about the spread of myth around the world from one point, nor its spontaneous origin at many points, nor the specific differences between actual myths and cultures. If he had had empirical aims, he would have indicated what phenomena he wanted to explain—these myths at this place during this time or these actions. He could have catalogued all examples of the definition or at least defined categories which would have included an indefinite number of examples, either under subjects of the myths (lunar myths, hero myths, creation myths, etc.) or under some other criteria (religious myths, nature myths, or myths of certain places, times). The empirical data from the particular social sciences are relevant to

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

27

Cassirer's nonempirical ideas about myth. They suggest to him how to define a first level of human mentality that would share some principles of the making of worldviews with later more advanced perspectives. The data neither verify nor fail to verify Cassirer's principles; the data merely guide the direction of their development and serve as vehicles of conception. "The determination of their pure content [i.e. the forms of the human spirit], of what they signify and are, is independent of the question of their empirical genesis and its psychological condtitions" PSF II, 11). (It is as if the data are colors added in the process of making shapes—the principles—become more defined.) Empirical Studies Are Not Adequate In fact, for the philosopher no empirical description can adequately explain the meaning of myth. According to Cassirer, The empirical data of comparative mythology and comparative religion merely present the problem, for the more extensive they become, the more evident becomes the parallelism of myth formation. But behind this empirical regularity we must once again seek the original spiritual necessity from which it derives. Just as, in cognition, we seek to ascertain the formal laws of thought which make a mere rhapsody of perceptions into a system of knowledge, so in mythology we must inquire into the nature of that formal unity through which the infinitely multiform world of myth ceases to be a mere conglomerate of arbitrary representations and unrelated notions and constitutes a characteristic spiritual whole. Here again the mere enrichment of our factual knowledge is fruitless until it serves to deepen our knowledge of principles, until a mere aggregate of particular factors is replaced by a specific articulation, a superordination and subordination of formative elements (PSF II, 20). The problem of a philosophy of mythology is the problem of finding a formal unity by which all of the empirical data could be made into a coherent system. In Cassirer's terms, "each factor [of mythical thinking] must be assigned to that specific place within mythology as a whole, where it takes on its idea meaning. This whole contains an inner truth of its own, for it designates one of the paths by which mankind has advanced both to its specific self-consciousness and to its specific objective

28

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

consciousness" (PSF II, 16). In literature classes a good principle of interpretation is to interpret any part so that it fits in with the most consistent network of meaning of all the parts. In this way, the mythical world is a specific microcosm of the more general systematic whole of knowledge Cassirer as a continental idealist would be looking for. The methodological principle for understanding all of culture is the same one used for understanding one of its forms—myth. There are other arguments he uses for the objectivity of myth and hence the posibility of a theory—a philosophy—of myth. The strength of belief in primitive experience is an argument for some kind of truth (PSF II, 5). If primitives had just been playing or pretending or doing something while intending something else they never would have gone to such extreme and incomprehensible lengths as to offer a human sacrifice to insure the fertility of crops. As wrong as this causal relationship seems to us, it nonetheless can be true as one block of a cultural world that supports and is supported by other ones, all of them pointing differentially to a better world, and there certainly was the truth of the solidarity of life uniting humans and even inanimate nature in a cycle, the closest modern parallel being the idea of the ecosystem with its food chain. Furthermore, myth has its own truth insofar as its symbols serve to unite humans into a community (PSF I, 88); the ideas are not the delusions of an individual mind, not the arbitrary whims of an isolated people, since mythical phenomena have astounding parallels throughout the world and the history of civilization. The patterns of behavior point to laws that need to be discovered, or concepts that philosophy needs to formulate. A philosopher's approach to myth—an idealistic one at least—is to place this type of knowledge into a general theory including other types and to show the evolution of the one into the other and the evolution within types of knowledge. Cassirer does not discuss in detail the transformation of specific myths into new ones as Lévi-Strauss does, even though his writings on the history of ancient Greek philosophy explain the evolution of mythical cosmogonies into new ones while progressively becoming more rational and philosophical.10 He does define myth such that it has within it a progress toward more systematic knowledge, as will be seen in later sections. As a conclusion about Cassirer's problem of mythology, he does think philosophy can offer its own type of solution. Without denying the value of empirical approaches per se—for he himself adapts them to his own purposes—he rejects them as the proper method of philosophy

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

29

which is to seek a formal ideal unity of myth definable by using empirical research; here the empirical data act as color does in any field: both painting and science have their own uses of color and their own conceptions of it without having any common conception of it, for it is remade into an idea belonging to the field. Only from a third standpoint or the standpoint of everyday life does color have the same meaning. It is the specifically philosophical meaning of myth that will need to be defined in upcoming sections. Cassirer's definition develops in three stages: the idea of symbolic form, the idea of a universal power first present in myth, and the idea of an ideal limit of myth and all other human activities. The use of empirical data by Cassirer may still seem confusing: either the data do affect his philosophical conceptions, in which case he should be held accountable for their accuracy, or they do not, in which case it is questionable whether his theory offers any help in understanding the "real" world. The data "fills in the outline" created by philosophy and makes them clearer (LM 15). Cole interprets Cassirer to mean that the theory of myth is only an outline not a detailed picture (review of PSF II, 253). More technically, Cassirer justifies himself: "Philosophy does not create this fact [of myth] with its intrinsic significance but, having found it to be present, investigates it for the 'conditions of its possibility'" (PSF II, xiii); "the ideal form [of myth or any other activity of culture] is known only by and in the aggregate of the sensible signs which it uses for its expression" (PSF I, 86). "I have tried," he writes, "to avoid any cleavage between systematic and historical considerations and have striven for a close fusion between the two. Only through a reciprocal relation of this sort can the two promote and throw light on each other" (PSF III, xvi). Clearly, he regards empirical input as necessary to his ideal conceptions. His specific uses of the empirical data will make their status in philosophy clearer. The Difference between the Roles of Empirical Data in the Empirical Sciences of Myth and in Cassirer's Philosophy The most general way to think of the difference is to regard the empirical data as the stopping point of the sciences but the starting point of philosophy. Although Cassirer used the analogy of providing a philosophical outline for the empirical data provided by anthropology and the other sciences, those sciences themselves piece together the interpreted isolated data into an explanation, though more emphasis is given to the

30

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

interpreting of individual data than to the making of inferences on the basis of them so that they can form a system of knowledge. The piecedtogether explanation is looser than what Cassirer seeks and he creates more general unifying concepts not attempted by the special sciences. This difference in the roles of the empirical data can be made clearer through a quote from Mircea Eliade about what he aims to do: "The rites and beliefs here grouped under 'Regeneration of Time' afford an endless variety, and we are under little illusion as to the possibility of fitting them into a coherent and unified system. In any case, the present essay requires neither an exposition of all the forms this regeneration assumes nor a morpholosgical and historical analysis of them. Our aim is not to learn how the calendar came to be constituted, nor to discover how far it might be possible to work out a system that would comprehend the conceptions of the 'year' held by various peoples" (The Myth of the Eternal Return 51). Eliade is most concerned with the right interpretation of empirical phenomena. Cassirer wants to collect the interpreted empirical data to guide his philosophical imagination while constructing an ideal system of knowledge. The data, it will be seen in this book, only help him work out the ideal notions—especially that of "symbolic form"— with which he began. The Question of the Validity of Cassirer's Views by Correspondence to the Empirical Reality, or the Way Myth Really Is Since Cassirer sets himself the task of forming principles about what a worldview or perspective is, he believes the problem is not so much the content (LM 11). Nevertheless, Cassirer goes to great trouble to read many different researches on all topics, and this diversified reading helps him to ensure that the data have been interpreted with a fair consensus of expert opinion. But his philosophy is not to be judged on the basis of the interpretation of the empirical phenomenon of myth—his views are not to be judged as true or false in comparison to those of say, Eliade—because he already accepts the work he cites as his starting point. His work should be judged by the new philosophical principles that he creates and which do not have exact analogues in the empirical sciences. The idea of symbolic form is one of these. Cassirer does not think the issue of correspondence to empirical reality is irrelevant, as his copious notes show. He does believe there is some correspondence, but only on the whole, not every single idea to an

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

31

empirical fact. For example, the same occurs in science. There is a sense in which the correspondence of science to empirical reality is the whole science to the whole world and not every idea to a separate fact in the world. There are concepts in science which are ideal constructs and have no empirical correlate, such as absolute zero. However, the theories containing such ideal notions can make predictions and do help to order phenomena we experience in new and productive ways. The theories correspond on the whole. Cassirer believes his philosophy has a similar type of correspondence, which is not the type of correspondence expected by anthropologists or other empirical researchers. The "Reconstruction" of the Perspective of Myth Cassirer uses the term "reconstruction" in several passages to define how the data have some relevance to his philosophical principles (PSF III, 57). Cassirer insists that his principles do not define myth temporally before he considers the data (PSF III, 62). Those principles come logically before the data as their unity and order: so they become material for philosophical concepts that are not themselves part of the primitive data. A perspective must always be reconstructed as it does not exist wholly in any one datum of the primitive consciousness. The form of mythical thinking is more general than the particular contents. In more philosophical phrasing, the reconstructed principles of the perspective are called "the conditions of the possibility of myth" (PSF III, 57). Cassirer means that they are the conditions of the possibility of the understanding of myth as a philosophical idea, as a type of knowing; he does not mean that they are the empirical conditions for the existence of this or that culture. The reconstructed principles of myth are aspects of the way myth makes its worldview. Cassirer does not believe the content of a primitive's mind can be adequately (i.e. philosophically) interpreted unless the way the content is formed is taken into account (PSF III, 25). As it will become apparent, the way the contents are formed becomes the most important aim in Cassirer's interpretation of myth. A PHILOSOPHICAL DEFINITION IS NEEDED Perhaps nonphilosophical definitions of myth are always empirical. Many nonphilosophers define myth as a tale of some kind. Kirk defines it as a traditional tale (Myth 282). Walter Burkert explicitly agrees with Kirk, only adding the idea of "secondary, partial reference to something

32

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

of collective importance" (23). Cassirer's definition is much broader. In nontechnical terms it includes not only verbal or written stories but also a type of perception, actions, customs, images, and pictorial representations. Myth is a type of living, feeling, and knowing. How can the philosopher from a different perspective than myth explain it accurately? Can there be an idealistic definition of myth? A common practice when defining terms is to research their etymology, which in this case would reveal the well-known terms "mythos" and "logos." Krois discusses Cassirer's definition of the task of philosophy as the confronting of mythos with logos ("Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and the Problem of Value," vi). In his definition "mythos" means a pattern of beliefs of a culture, and "logos" means the controlling principle, purpose, or reason in the entire universe. This discussion suggests that the actual pattern of meaning found in primitive cultures is subordinate to a higher principle of order which should be opposed to the former in order to improve it. The philosopher who is no longer a mythical thinker has a perspective outside of myth proper. The question is, how did myth evolve into other perspectives before they had come into being? In The Semiotic of Myth James Liszka regards the movement of myth as the beginning of critical self-reflection toward a new kind of speech, logos (1). Cassirer, too, regards myth as the earliest way of "objectivization" or "self-revelation" which is the defining trait of all cultural activities. Elsewhere, Cassirer calls myth and the other ways of objectivization "directions which the process of determination may follow" (PSF I, 288); the suggestion is that myth can become more and more determinate and eventually lead to a new way of objectivization ("objectivization" means making any object or symbol, as a unit of a universe, and also it means the discovery of the ways of making those symbols which become apparent through them). Then, Cassirer believes he as a philosopher can define myth because it has a tendency toward objectivization or world-making which is still in some sense a tendency of ours today. THE TYPE OF CASSIRER'S PHILOSOPHY A discussion of Cassirer's type of philosophy will be useful for nonphilosophers and for readers of philosophy who are not very familiar with the tradition Cassirer develops further. The field of philosophy is usually divided into the three main categories of Analytic Philosophy, Continental Philosophy, and a miscellaneous category. This categorization is essential for an understanding of Cassirer's type of philosophy, for

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

33

the differences make its positive traits clear whereas they otherwise would be more difficult to see. Analytic Philosophy is without a doubt the greater movement in terms of numbers of faculty in America and England, but Continental Philosophy claims for itself the greater number of classics taught in undergraduate curricula and representing the history of philosophy. The two types are often mutually exclusive if not antagonistic, as can be seen in the hiring practices of many departments or the publishing decisions of many companies. Cassirer belongs to the group of Continental Philosophers, and for readers unfamiliar with their methodology his works might seem rather unaccommodating, or not userfriendly, though among Continental Philosophers his writing is thought to be rather readable in comparison to others such as Georg Hegel or Martin Heidegger. The term "continental" refers to the continent Europe and was applied by British and American philosophers to refer to primarily French and German thinkers sharing methods, aims, problems, and assumptions. Assumptions of a Continental Philosopher To be a Continental Philosopher means to accept certain assumptions about truth and the practice of philosophy that have evolved throughout its history. Analytic philosophers tend to rely on formal logic and are allied with empiricists, who believe truth can only be grounded through sensory experience. For Cassirer, philosophy and logic are independent fields. Whereas logic is an "analytical clarification" of existing ideas, philosophy is generative and synthetic: it is a "genetic definition of the concept," being concerned with how it is made and how it comes to have meaning in relation to other ideas (PSF III, 296). This distinction does not mean that philosophy is alogical, as a philosopher such as Nietzsche would often seem to represent. It only means that the relationships of concepts in philosophy are produced in a manner different from that of logic, as the distinction in the treatises of the two fields throughout their histories would indicate, logic sometimes being a branch of philosophy or of mathematics, yet clearly not synonymous with the totality of the field. Cassirer does not deny the value of either logical methods of determining the consistency of ideas or their empirical verification, but to these he adds a method unique to part of the philosophical tradition; namely, the dialectical method. Since it is a difficult method to understand and since it is not universally accepted by philosophers, it will only

34

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

be briefly described later. After all, it is a subject for experts and much of his theory of myth is understandable without difficult argumentation. For now, it can be defined as a method which tends to synthesize views into larger ones because it finds a single principle assumed by two contradictory views. Dialectic will be described more when the dialectic of myth's development is explained. Not often does Cassirer argue against empiricists and logical positivists, who tend to begin with a correspondence or copy theory of knowledge and may also argue for a coherence theory, because he comes from a tradition in which they were argued against time and time again and also because his style aims to be positive by building up the best case he can for his own viewpoint. Somewhat uncharacteristically, he does argue against the assumptions of the main alternative style of philosophy in the following passage: Critical philosophy, on the other hand, which cannot simply accept the natural world view but must inquire into the conditions of its possibility, has every reason to question this principle [that knowledge is a copy of what is experienced through the senses] and at least to doubt its exclusive and self-evident character. This doubt does not mean that the validity of the principle as such is negated but only that instead of being taken as absolute it is recognized as specific and relative—as a validity which is not given in the simple content of reality but partakes of a certain interpretation of reality. Here again positivism fails to recognize the pure energy, the activity and spontaneity of form; it regards a difference of formation as a difference in content, as a difference in the facticity of the empirical datum. But if we take a strict view of the positivists' own demand for pure description, we must insist on a clear distinction between description and explanation—we must insist that no factor pertaining to the causal understanding of the world, no factor whose validity and necessity can only be justified and deduced on the basis of this causal understanding, shall be injected into the description of data" (PSF III, 28).

Here Cassirer makes the strong objection that empiricism cannot justify its own assumption according to its idea of knowledge—that the assumption "is not given in the simple content." Empiricism cannot explain variations in the interpretation of data except by arguing for variations in the content of what is gained through the senses, whereas the constancy of the sensory data is what is assumed as the basis of truth. In contrast Cassirer as an idealist, rationalist, or continental philosopher explains variations in

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

35

interpretation—differences in knowledge—as differences in the way of knowing, as differences in the level of development of human beings. Certainly, Cassirer is not a relativist in the sense that there would be no understanding or communication between people of different cultures. The empiricists approach knowledge in a noncultural, nonhuman way, using more the model of animal intelligence which does not vary throughout many generations and from individual to individual in the same way that human intelligence does. (The reader may wish to read another argument against sensationalism and positivism. See PSF III, Note 23.) Although the debate between empiricists and continental-type philosophers has its specific character in the twentieth century, the perennial struggle between the approaches suggests that the differences cannot be merely intellectual—perhaps the nonphilosophical depths suggest some reliance on underlying divergent myths of life, retained as unrecognized strata in conscious thought, for, if the differences were only a matter of thought, why can't intelligible people come to a consensus? An Idealistic Theory of Knowledge The meaning which human beings experience, for Cassirer, is not a copy of what exists outside the human body but is more a creation of a world for which there is no "outside." Logically speaking, outside space there could only be more space, just as any moment of time must have had a moment before it. So, too, humans cannot experience something that is pre-experienced or as-of-yet unexperienced and make it into an individual interpretation by adding some subjective attitude toward it. Animals live in an environment which may only be as small as a spider's web whereas humans live in a world made up of possibilities, something not here and not now, something not even "real," and all of its ideas must be of the same status if they are to fit together to make up a unified world, like pieces of a puzzle. For Cassirer, the meaning of human ideas is always "symbolic"— referring to and related to other ideas in an ideal network. The meaning of any idea only becomes explicit through a complex of associations, not by a single reference to a physical thing. James Lawrence Cole admirably describes Cassirer's symbolic theory of knowledge as opposed to the empiricist's sensory approach: Cassirer holds that human experience derives its form and structure not from its relation to some given', but from its relation to sets of

36

Cassirer and Langer on Myth symbols. Human sensory experience is never an experience of mere sensations. It is always the experience of an object in an ordered world. For example, when I look in front of me I do not see a brown sensation in a sensoryfield.I see the arm of a brown chair in this room. Such a sensory experience is called an intuition by Cassirer. An intuition is never an isolated datum, but it always is the experience of something which is part of some world, here the world of contemporary commonsense objects. A world of experience has associated with it a set of symbols; in the example above, this is contemporary ordinary language (251).

If color is thought to be sensed separately from shape or from the meaning of the object in relation to others, then color is not a sensation but an abstraction. In Cassirer's view, any idea is like a Chinese box containing other boxes, except that we can never come to the last box and for practical purposes do not need to. "This meaning [of the most characteristic ideas] does not consist in what they 'are' in themselves, nor in something that they copy, but in a specific trend of ideal formation—not in an outward object toward which they aim, but in a determinate mode of objectivization" (PSF III, 383). So the opening of the Chinese boxes leads not to a last box but for Cassirer it leads to a reflection on the process of opening them. A symbol does not refer to something nonsymbolic but it refers to other symbols all of which "refer" to the common manner of their formation. Words are defined by other words and we can never find a word that does not need to be defined by other ones; so the only way that we can have even enough meaning to act on without being engaged in an infinite referral to other words is to admit that words also have an immediate meaning besides explicit definition. This meaning before explicit definition and working with it is the fortunate product of what was originally the myth-making function and will be discussed later in Chapter 4 as the universal human ability of expression. In general, these ideas about symbolism are consistent with those of some other philosophers, such as Charles Sanders Pierce, the nineteenthcentury thinker about symbols, and Alfred North Whitehead, the twentieth-century mathematician-logician who became a major philosopher. Mentioning them may serve to support Cassirer's general way of thinking while also clarifying it by using somewhat different terms. According to Whitehead, "The human mind is functioning symbolically when some components of its experience elicit consciousness, beliefs, emo-

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

37

tions, and usages, respecting other components of its experience. The former set of components are the 'symbols', and the latter set constitute the 'meaning' of the symbols (8). This relationship of meaning is called "symbolic reference." Of course, the status of ideas would always be shifting from symbol to meaning and that meaning would then become a new symbol, and the process would go on indefinitely but individual symbols could have their meaning without an infinite referral. According to Peirce, signs convey meaning by being part of a larger network, the minimum being a triadic relation, in which a sign stands for an object, conveys meaning, and produces an overall idea, an "interpretant."11 Resulting from the relation between a sign and its object, and in fact making the relation possible (1.553), the interpretant is a "mental effect" or "thought" (1.564). It is "a more developed sign" than the original one (2.228). The development of one sign into another is a necessary phase in giving significance to concepts and words. Peirce almost regards meaning as synonymous with the translation of a sign from one system of signs into another (4.127). On Peirce's view, the meaning of a sign "is the sign it has to be translated into" (4.127). Snce he does not think there is a "final interpretant" one might suppose that he thinks there is an infinite regress in the series of references so that there is no meaning afterall. Instead of trying to defend Peirce, I would now like to point out that he, like Cassirer, believes that symbols are units of meaning acquiring their meaning from their unique status in a network, and it is the fact that they belong in specific groups of symbols that helps to limit their referral by the laws of each group to other symbols in it. The most important fact is that a symbol immediately contains a suggestion or a link to other ones; it points beyond itself to other symbols which do the same thing. Since knowledge through symbols does not copy an object outside the body, it and its particular objects as perceived in the world can change together throughout human history. It is not the case that objects have the same meaning for everyone in history. A parrot for a primitive may embody an ancestor and so they would worship it whereas today people behave differently toward birds precisely because it has a different "meaning": it has a different relationship to other symbols (the actual ancestors) and indirectly to an entire world of symbols. It is characteristic of Cassirer to define different worldviews and very uncharacteristic of empiricists and many logicians (who may however entertain ideas of possible worlds). Although it is not my aim throughout this book to be an apologist for Cassirer, I might add some ideas to help explain his own. There is the common objection that the idealistic view like Cassirer's

38

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

would seem to deny that 2 and 2 always equals 4. Cassirer would reply that if we were to examine exactly what the idea means for the person who thinks it we would see that it does not stand absolutely independent from other conceptions and so its true meaning is part and parcel of other ones. There is a sense in which the number ten is the same for the sixthcentury Pythagoreans as it is for us 2,600 years later, yet part of the meaning of the idea when understood thoroughly and not abstractly is that it must be understood as a geometrical pattern and it is not intelligible apart from its religious significance as an immediate icon of perfection and harmony; we do not need to think of ten in the shape of a pyramid and we do not worship it. The evolution of worldviews throughout history parallels the diversity in the fields of learning. As William Van Roo states, "Scientific grasp of reality is mediated by a particular logical and conceptual structure. Consequently a variety of media, or concepts, will correspond to various structures of the object. Physical, chemical, and biological objects do not coincide, because every science frames its questions from its own standpoint, and subjects phenomena to a special interpretation and formation" ("Symbol according to . ..", 489; PSF I, 76). The special interpretation of philosophy affects the type of theory of myth. Similarly, it is not quite right to say that the ideas of a philosopher on myth contradict those of an anthropologist's if they are both advanced in their fields, because the meaning system in which the explanations occur do not follow the same laws; no one would say a painting of a tree is better than a poem of it— they are different kinds of construction. For this reason, it has been necessary to discuss the question of what a philosophy of myth means, as opposed to the discussion by other fields. The Goal of a Comprehensive Theory Cassirer believes myth or any other symbolic form can only be understood "within a general system of philosophical idealism" (PSF I, 72). He understands the mythical worldview through the development of the main worldviews throughout civilization. This characteristic of Cassirer's philosophy and of much philosophy up to the twentieth century is to have the aim of a comprehensive theory of knowledge making all of human knowledge unified. Sometimes we say in ordinary life that something makes sense because all the events seem to fit together into one picture. In this human need is the nascent

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

39

philosophical tendency. When teaching at Yale in 1943, Cassirer felt that his students in a seminar on the philosophy of language did not want or were not able to form questions about a comprehensive philosophy of language; instead they asked specific questions of semantics (Hendel, PSF I, vii), clarifying ordinary language, making distinctions in terms, "cracking" metaphors or turning all language into common sense terms. In contrast, Cassirer would not explain what primitives really mean by pointing to misunderstandings or ambiguities in their use of language but he would define a mythical worldview and would place the question of the meaning of myth in a more general theory of knowledge, involving other worldviews (symbolic forms). As we will see, Cassirer in fact tries to develop an theory of all human knowledge up to the present (and there is some reason for believing that he thought it also established at least the outlines of all future knowledge, when he discusses the idea of the "ideal limit"). "Ultimately thought," he writes, "seeks to fit all particular propositions, all particular conceptual structures into a unitary and all-inclusive intellectual context" (PSF III, 284); this context is a developed form of the human world of ordinary experience. The concern for a universal theory of knowledge or the lack of it distinguishes continental philosophies from analytic ones. In most empirical approaches to myth from the social sciences and humanities "myth" does not mean a worldview but it means some kind of narrative. Cassirer does not begin with the idea that he would like to explain myth; he begins with the idea that he would like to exlain all knowledge by relating the types in a comprehensive theory. Myth may or may not be useful in helping him to do this. In other terms, Cassirer often declares the task of philosophy to be the seeking of unity—an ideal unity. The second main goal is one dating back to at least Socrates, who unfortunately left it rather undeveloped and indeterminate; it is self-knowledge, by which he means the coming to understand the processes of our own thinking so that they may be improved. This theme, most strongly put in the later works such as An Essay on Man, still runs throughout his works and throughout human history, beginning with its roots in his early ideas about the logos in Greek philosophy undergoing a process which he calls "self-finding" (Geschichte der Philosophie 1925), and then being developed into a general cultural principle in The Logic of the Humanities (1942). To introduce a future discussion of the progressive character of myth, I could point out Cassirer's belief that mythical thinkers have within themselves the power to understand their own ways of thinking and the progressive

40

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

realization of them finally leads their descendents to new worldviews in a slow process requiring generations for a society. Idealist philosophers are characteristically concerned with explaining how people can develop the most important or general ideas. Such goals of inquiry and assumptions of a type of philosophy are so fundamental that the disagreements have been going on throughout the entire history of philosophy. A good early example being the disagreements between the Sophists and Plato. In the Medieval Ages there was a dictum, often repeated, that "one must believe in order to understand." This short description of Cassirer's type of philosophy could not convince many empiricists, nor certainly end empiricism once and for all. Yet, it does serve to orient readers to a specific way of philosophizing to be defined more through Cassirer's approach to myth. Throughout this study it might be useful to remember that myth is discussed in this or that way because doing so helps Cassirer complete his overall plan; of course, in completing his goals he goes to great pains to be true to the empirical studies from various social sciences which he meticulously and prodigiously collects. THE ORIGIN OF CASSIRER'S PHILOSOPHY IN HEGEL'S With a thinker who read as widely as Cassirer it seems naive to speak of the single origin of his thought. For the general type and structure of his philosophy, the three most prominent sources in increasing order of importance are Vico, Kant, and Hegel. Cassirer himself spoke of Vico as essential to his work. There is an excellent discussion of the connection by Donald Verene in "Vico's Influence on Cassirer" and "Vico and Cassirer." He gathers different statements by Cassirer on Vico—such as "Giambattista Vico may be called the real discoverer of the myth"—and interprets their significance in light of Verene's own extensive scholarship on Vico (5). It becomes clear that Vico is the main influence on Cassirer's choice of myth as a subject and that myth is essential to the plan of his entire philosophy, for Vico understands the legitimacy of myth's claim to being a basic human activity and the illegitimacy of science's claim to exclude the humanities and arts as not essential to an understanding of reality or not equal in status to science. Far more than Vico, Immanuel Kant is often regarded as the main precursor of Cassirer by many scholars. Certainly there are many reasons to believe this. He studied with a famous neo-Kantian, Hermann Cohen,

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

41

edited Kant's works, uses expressions derived from Kant extensively throughout his works, and even speaks of his philosophy as a transformation of the Kantian: "the critique of reason [the project of Kant] becomes the critique of culture" (PSF I, 80). Another reason is that Charles Hendel in his introduction to Cassirer's main masterpiece The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms seems to write as much about Kant as Cassirer, and when Hegel is mentioned it is always to point out the disagreement. Naturally, this introduction might be the only article read by many nonspecialists on Cassirer, so the pigeonholing of Cassirer into a follower of a well known philosopher would be a trap easy to fall into. Also, people who do not have the inclination to become experts on a topic can accept an easy or ready-made classification, which often enough contains much truth. Perhaps the first discussion of this issue of interpretation was by Verene in "Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms"; John Krois also discusses the issue in various publications. The best evidence shows that Hegel is the more direct influence of the general plan of the new philosophy, because Cassirer explicitly states he is deriving the meaning of phenomenology from Hegel and the main overall organizing concepts for his philosophy occur in the third volume of The Philosophy

of Symbolic Forms called The Phenomenology

of

Knowledge (PSF III, XIV). In James Lawrence Cole's review of Cassirer's Mythical Thought there is an explanation of how it makes a lot of sense to understand Hegel as the more direct "parent" of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (253); one main consideration is the similarity of Cassirer's method to Hegel's (which is dialectical in the extreme and is often used as a caricature of incomprehensibility). By comparison, the style of Cassirer is not extreme, not incomprehensible; the many references to empirical studies help to prevent a few main difficult arguments—the superstructure that philosophy creates—from threatening readers as it does in the case of Hegel, who only presents the superstructure of experience with few recognizable examples from actual experiences. THE FOUNDING PRINCIPLES OF MYTH AND THE OTHER CULTURAL FORMS Since myth is one type of cultural form, it is important to understand the assumptions with which Cassirer begins the study of all the forms. Also, the course that Cassirer's explanation of myth takes can be partly understood if the reasons for studying it in particular are discussed.

42

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

There Must Be Different Ways of Knowing Cassirer states that his philosophy begins in his 1910 monograph on the new form of concepts in recent science, called Substance and Function in the English translation (PSF I, 69). The title refers to the change in the history of science from what he calls substance-concepts to functionconcepts. It is in this book that one can find the presupposition of his philosophy, which Verene rightly believes is the idea of a symbolic form ("An Examination of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" 6). This presupposition is a change in the theory of knowledge which resembles the change in scientific concepts. In this way Cassirer starts his theory of knowledge not only by criticizing a previous philosopher (Hegel) but also by taking into account the changes in science. It would be misleading to say that changes in science determined changes in philosophy, since similar arguments about the need for a new type of concept occur when Cassirer criticizes Hegel.12 What these arguments are and how they can be judged are very technical philosophical issues. For a study on myth the relevant conclusions can be summarized and for a fuller account the reader is best referred to longer, more technical discussions.13 Here is Cassirer's argument for a plurality of ways of knowing. To start a new philosophy, Cassirer rejects the concept of an absolute in the thought of his predecessor. A single principle for Hegel, the absolute idea, unites the cultural forms "art, religion, and philosophy" making art and religion inadequate manifestations of it (See the final chapter of The Phenomenology of Mind). Cassirer objects when he writes, "The relations constituting the totality cannot be fully expressed and 'copied' by any particular formation"; and conversely, "the particular element, which serves as a sign, is indeed not materially similar to the totality that is signified" (SF 285). Hegel's absolute idea is such an external standard and unifying principle of experience. Cassirer, instead, seeks an internal standard and unity by redefining experience as always representative or symbolic. Cassirer's relativization of knowledge into different cultural forms evolving through time is regarded as positive and objective, not negative and subjective. Often the idea of knowledge being "relative" carries a negative connotation of a merely subjective opinion, as the idea of a situational ethics tends to. Actually, Cassirer believes he has found new principles about knowledge that make his precursor's, Hegel's, relative. He compares his own idea of relativity to Einstein's when he says that far

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

43

from denying objective, universal knowledge, the Theory of Relativity creates a new standard of universal concepts in physics (ETR 393). All Knowledge Is Symbolic Cassirer does not think it is the right approach to explain myth in terms of something nonmythical or to derive it from some other source (PSF III, 281-82). Then its meaning would be explained in terms of its system of symbols—the way they relate to one another. For Cassirer, the meaning of "symbol" is much broader than that we usually use in everyday life. It is not that of common sense: it is not a conscious fiction which refers to something real or physical in a world external to our body, as a flower is said to symbolize a woman. Instead, there are only symbols. A flower is a symbol in the mind of an artist or it is a symbol for any human being insofar as it is part of a universe of meanings. For Cassirer, if there could be something other than symbols it would be tantamount to saying my experience refers to something outside of it and I know what it is, which is contradictory, for if the person knows it then it is part of experience. For Cassirer, there is no human understanding of something merely "physical": something which does not belong in a network of ideas constituting a world that is changing and will develop into a new one. For something to have meaning it must have a reference to other things in a world (SF 43). Even animals can be shown to live in different environments because of their differing reactions to outward stimuli. If the stimuli were absolutely the same and if behavior depended only on the type of stimuli, then there would be no differences in behavior, but there are vast and real cultural differences. Since there is no single symbol which all others ultimately mean, there must be different types of representation; that is, there must be different ways in which symbols refer to each other. Representation means (1) that each idea means other ones by refering to them, and (2) that as a consequence each idea indirectly points the way to the principles of its own ordering, unity, and formation. As an illustration of both aspects of the definition, there is the case of language. An example of the systematic referral is the definition of a word by other words. An example of the "referral" to the manner of formation is language learning. When initially learning language children may not have explicit grammar lessons from their parents, but they soon form new syntactical combinations to the delight of their parents because the words and phrases contain within their meaning an implicit, suggested, or symbolic sense of grammar. The

44

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

grammar is part of the formation of the meaning of the words, because in ungrammatical sequences words do not seem to make the sense that they should. This internal connection of one symbol with another, their being woven into a specific kind of fabric, is present sensuously in the type or style of the symbols—whether mythical, scientific, or artistic, and so on. Each symbol must be capable of sensuous representation but yet must point away from its sensuous embodiment to the intellectual process which gave it its own nature—so it is a kind of index to the unity of the network in which it belongs (PSF I, 106). This capacity of the human being to make symbols, whether gestures, images, words, scientific symbols and so on, allows a person to use a single symbol as "the expression for definite complexes of meaning" not immediately given in the sensory content. The symbol ultimately points to the specific whole of experience, the manner of its formation ("In each one of its freely projected signs the human spirit apprehends the object and at the same time apprehends itself and its own formative law" PSF I, 92.) A baby learns to recognize itself in a mirror and soon makes faces, trying various expressions. In a recent book, The Magic Mirror: Myth's Abiding Power,

Elizabeth M. Baeten suggests the role of myths is to be mirrors: to teach us more about our selves and in so doing to improve us. Cassirer's view is that we are so interested in our human artifacts because in them we come to know how we made them and so we can experience the adventure and exhilaration of self-development, culture. Cassirer gives the following example of the reflexive nature of symbols in the context of a discussion on myth. 'In ancient Egyptian the word kod designates successively the most diverse concepts: to make pots, to be a potter, to form, create, build, work, draw, navigate, travel, sleep; and substantively: likeness, image, metaphor, similarity, circle, ring. The original representation, 'to turn around, to turn in a circle', underlies all these and similar derivatives. The turning of the potter's wheel evoked the representation of the potter's formative activity, out of which grew the significations form, create, build, work" (PSF I, 288). That a symbol is always potentially self-reflexive can be seen in the example of modern cultural works such as poetry: John Ashbery's title Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The poetry being the convex mirror is a larger than life representation or symbol of the inner world-making of the poet. In the well-known opening passages of The Republic on the method to be followed, Plato writes that his discussion of the ideal state is actually meant to present the soul's properties "writ large."

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

45

As a consequence, this reflexive property of symbolism allows people to revise their experience and to pass it on to future generations (by accumulating larger complexes of meaning in a single symbol, or said in other words by building higher and higher conceptions that when seen with regard to a retrospective vision of their evolution contain a great number of concepts nested or contained within them as if Chinese boxes, one in the other) and so marks the fundamental border, for Cassirer, between the animal and its environment and the human and its ideal history in which it lives. Symbols allow meaning to endure or have an influence across generations of lives (PSF I, 89). In addition to being reflexive, symbolism is systematic by its very nature. No one symbol could exist unless there were a system of symbols, just as a hammer would make no sense if there were no nails in the world to be hammered. New systems of forming symbols have evolved throughout civilization, and these differences suggest a general plan of a philosophy. From the new idea of the symbolic nature of all knowledge, its representative character, Cassirer is led on to investigate the various types of symbolism. THE GENERAL PLAN Phrases Characterizing the Idea of a Symbolic Form Cassirer uses many words and phrases to characterize the idea of a symbolic form. The large number indicates the importance of the concept, its multiplicity of relationships, and the degree to which Cassirer determined its many aspects. The phrases express various aspects. Common phrases are "cultural forms" and "forms of consciousness." Some phrases convey how concepts are integrals of a more comprehensive whole, a system of knowing: a "world" (PSF II, 69); "a whole, as a selfcontained cosmos" (PSF III, 447). Some phrases emphasize the constitution by symbols: "image-worlds" (PSF I, 111). Others emphasize the autonomy of symbolic forms: "a self-contained cosmos with its own center of gravity" (PSF II, 26); "self-contained cosmos" (PSF III, 107). Other features are permanence in the phrase "lasting configuration" (PSF II, 69) and ideality in the phrase "ideal mode" (PSF I, 96-97). Most phrases convey the meaning of a symbolic form as a specific type of making a perspective: "a direction followed by consciousness in constructing a spiritual reality" PSF II, 20); "an inner and outer world"

46

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

(PSF III, 102); "realms of objective spirit" (PSF II, xiv-xv); "a specific and original [not derivable] manner of vision" (PSF III, 123); "a form of insight, of spiritual perspective" PSF III, 282); "vehicles and media of thought" (PSF III, 119); "different modes in which the human spirit gives form to reality" (PSF I, 96-97); and "fundamental lines not so much of reflection as of spiritual formation" (PSF III, 13). The List of Symbolic Forms To understand Cassirer's idea of myth it is not necessary to understand the relationships among all the symbolic forms. Getting an idea of the range and types of forms, nevertheless, can help in the understanding of what a symbolic form of culture is. The three most discussed forms are myth, "language" (or the empirical worldview), and science. These are discussed the most because they represent the three main phases in the evolution of civilization, though they do not correspond to specific historical periods. Also, each of them has its way of forming the world in which people live and act. In relation to these main forms the next most discussed are religion, history, and art—all of which have a continuing relationship with myth. Philosophy might be classified with the second most discussed forms. It is one of the "higher cultural strata" (EM 184) and "a unique mode of knowing" (LM 159). It seems as if politics is discussed more than any in this second classification; however, in The Myth of the State Cassirer does not define the symbolic form of politics, a "form based on the nation and the state" (MS 232). His concern is to extend his theory of myth by applying it to modern political myths. Many other possible symbolic forms are left undefined and unmentioned. The list includes the following: logic (PSF II, 172); ethics (PSF II, xiv and 172); economics, technology, law, social life, and writing (PSF II, xiv-xv). Poetry is also named as a symbolic form (LH 199). Cassirer does not claim this list to be exhaustive, nor does his system require that he have an exhaustive list. For the present discussion of his theory of myth, this list shows that various symbolic forms coexist to make up an actual culture, though in the case of mythical cultures they are so undefined as to be virtually indistinguishable from the mythical worldview. Each one eventually becomes distinct from myth insofar as a relatively autonomous system of symbols replaces the mythical.

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

47

Requirements of a System of Symbolic Forms These new initial ideas based on the concept of representation and on the symbolic character of any experience lead Cassirer on to a fundamental task, the first statement of which occurs in Einstein's Theory of Relativity Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint (ETR 447). It is an uncommon passage for Cassirer who seldom speaks about his whole philosophy: It is the task of systematic philosophy, which extends far beyond the theory of knowledge, to free the idea of the world from this onesidedness. It has to grasp the whole system of symbolic forms, the application of which produces for us the concept of an ordered reality, and by virtue of which subject and object, ego and world are separated and opposed to each other in definite form, and it must refer each individual in this totality to its fixed place. If we assume this problem solved, then the rights would be assured, and the limits fixed, of each of the particular forms of the concept and of knowledge as well as of the general forms of the theoretical, ethical, aesthetic and religious understanding of the world. Each particular form would be "relativized" with regard to the others, but since this "relativization" is throughout reciprocal and since no single form but only the systematic totality can serve as the expression of "truth" and "reality," the limit that results appears as a thoroughly immanent limit, as one that is removed as soon as we again relate the individual to the system of the whole." Here Cassirer describes the task of systematic philosophy: to understand the system of cultural forms. He turns his efforts toward culture as a result of the need to limit knowledge to definite, individual forms. People grasp reality through cultural forms, not an absolute. Each cultural form has its place in a system and is relativized in it. The cultural forms are called "symbolic forms" to emphasize the importance of symbolism. In constructing his system, Cassirer does not seek an absolute unity of the different symbolic forms from which they are deducible—a substantial unity—but a functional one in which the unity of each has content and specific difference. It will be a topic of discussion later in this study whether Cassirer is really introducing a new but modified kind of absolute principle. Perhaps he is like the politician who declares that everyone is equal but who has

48

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

the power to make decisions to help ensure this equality; in so doing, the leader of a country is in some ways—in George Orwell's misnomer— "more equal" than others (The phrase comes from Animal Farm when the animals are deciding to start a revolt but it must at the same time be agreed upon that different animals have different functions in the revolt and so the division of labor opens the Pandora's box of a new hierarchy to replace the rejected one which had been instituted by the human society dominating the animals). A Methodological Difficulty In Language and Myth Cassirer states a difficulty in completing his system of cultural forms: "For the mind, only that can be visible which has some definite form; but every form of existence has its source in some peculiar way of seeing, some intellectual formulation and intuition of meaning. 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 construction of spiritual reality, yet each of these organs has its individual assignment" (8-9). How can some forms develop into other ones without losing their universal status in all cultures? Cassirer seeks a purely immanent network of relations, not a set of relations based on a transcendent or absolute principle. Cassirer then must show how one type of knowing leads to another. A methodological problem lies in Cassirer's way (PSF I, 84). Examining the forms as if unified by a single principle may efface their individuality. On the other hand, concentrating on the forms' individuality may put out of sight their common effort. Cassirer solves this problem if he can find a factor in all forms that takes a different shape in each one. This kind of relationship is functional in contrast to one defined by common properties as in Aristotleian class logic. Cassirer strives to preserve the independence of the symbolic forms by not deducing or deriving one from another; and he recognizes their interconnection, as complementary avenues in the development of the human beings.

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

49

A good example of functional thinking is the Periodical Table of Elements which is able to organize different elements into a series not because they all had some similar characteristic such as hardness or whiteness but because whatever characteristics they did have were the result of unseen atomic structures, and these structures form the elements according to laws applicable to all. By using laws scientists looked for new elements having predicted physical properties and found some this way. Cassirer's functional method is similiar. What Cassirer does is to begin with some founding principles which apply to all cultural forms and to define the individual forms through the data which he learns from anthropologists and other social scientists. The process is meant to be reciprocal; the laws affect his interpretation of the data no less than the data have a role in defining further the laws and unity of culture, which Cassirer does not claim to know fully at the start. Cassirer believes philosophy should understand the products of culture to uncover the ways in which they are produced, just as scientists systematize the sensible properties of elements to formulate general laws apply to all in common (SMC 56). The law determining the structure of the cultural activity, the formative power, is the preliminary destination of analysis which will lead to laws of all areas of culture. This direction of inquiry with its method distinguishes the philosophy of culture from the specialized disciplines of culture, from anthropology, sociology, history. Their stopping point is one of Cassirer's starting points (the other being the founding principles). The Exact Number of Symbolic Forms Cassirer does not claim to present a complete philosophical anthropology (PSF IV, 55). He does not claim to define all symbolic forms in all the cultures. He claims to show that a unity of culture is possible using his main new philosophical principles, one of which is the idea of a symbolic form (the two main others are the universal function and the ideal limit, to be discussed in later chapters). He seems to be saying that he provides only the general outline and more details could be added; I suggest that he believes he presents all the essential ideas for a philosophy of culture and any further ideas would simply draw out the implications of his ideas rather than to extend the knowledge so far as to alter those he has developed. An issue that first comes to mind when anyone tries to make his

50

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

concept of symbolic form more detailed is the question of the list of symbolic forms. The exact number of symbolic forms is an open question for interpreters of Cassirer and one he did not feel was essential for his project to determine. This fact underlines the point that Cassirer is constructing a system of all human culture and to do this he needs to find a set of laws, not a description of all the phenomena. Myth, language, and science are the ones most discussed in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The three-volume work contains one volume on each subject. Religion and ethics are touched upon briefly. In Volume II Cassirer mentions other realms of "objective spirit" when speaking about the orign of symbolic forms in myth: ethics, economics, law, writing, technology, and social life (xiv-xv). Poetry is described as having some of the fundamental features of a symbolic form (LH 199). Art and history are symbolic forms discussed in An Essay on Man. In The Myth of the State he suggests that one symbolic form is possible which would be based on the nation and the state, something which he calls a "form of cultural life" (MS 232). Philosophy might also be a symbolic form, for it belongs with religion, art, and history in the series of "higher cultural strata" (EM 184), and philosophy is considered to be a unique mode of knowing (LM 159). In the final analysis, Cassirer leaves open what cultural activity could be defined as a symbolic form, provided that it meets the three criteria to be discussed shortly. The Coherence of a System It is important to remember that Cassirer does not beg the question or assume the unity of the symbolic forms but he uses it as a goal of inquiry which he thinks will be confirmed but he does not yet know the definitions of the relationships and the greatest unity making them different directions of a single project of human civilization (PSF I, 80-81). At the start of his philosophy he wants to discover what such a unity might be— as an alternative to the Hegelian idea of an absolute unity. In this way the project he sets himself is to discover a new unity of human culture. As we will see, these relationships and the unity will be defined in volume III of The Philosophy os Symbolic Forms. (In the discussion of that work the relationships are explained by the universal functions and the unity is defined as the ideal limit.) Someone may argue that the idea of a particular symbolic form belonging in a group presupposes some greater unity. This is an astute observation. Cassirer will in the course of his philosophy be forced to

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

51

define such a presupposed unity but in the beginning he does not yet know how to define it. Another way to look at it besides charging Cassirer with a simple fault of begging the question is to say that the idea of a symbolic form was meant as a revision of Hegel's idea of the unity of experience but that it is not general enough to replace it and be comprehensive. In this interpretation, the idea of symbolic form is not general enough to complete Cassirer's system of all culture: new concepts must develop from them and they do. An important issue arises whether the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is a system or not. Clarence Howe does not think Cassirer is a system builder but a "pathfinder" (page x). A respected rationalist expert in the systems of the nineteenth century and before, Brand Blanshard, concludes: "It is hard to think as one reads a book so wealthy as this in historic and scientific erudition, but at the same time so oddly inconclusive, that Cassirer was rather a distinguished reflective scholar than a great speculative philosopher. The learning is not mobilized in the interest of any theory; the book is not so much an 'essay on man' as a series of essays, all suggestive and enlightening, which converge on what? It is hard to say" (510). Here is the assumption of a continental philosopher that a system must "converge" on something or lead to an overall unity of experience, an ideal unity. To some extent, the criticism is correct for the main arguments are not in An Essay on Man, yet Cassirer's claims about the need for unity should have alerted Blanshard that they were in his previous books, as Cassirer himself said in the Preface to that work written almost twenty years after the three-volume masterpiece. Ironically, both Blanshard and Cassirer share some of the same assumptions about what philosophy should do, but Blanshard did not study Cassirer's work enough to recognize the revolutionary way in which Cassirer satisfies traditional expectations about what a philosophy is and does. Cassirer does think he builds a system, not one in which he could include all knowledge in all fields, although it seems as if he tries to do this, but one using a "systematic review" of representative knowledge to form general principles about it (Problem of Knowledge 19). Cassirer builds a new type of system yet retains the goal of system-building. THE CRITERIA OF AN INDIVIDUAL SYMBOLIC FORM With this plan of a philosophy in mind, a symbolic form can be defined more fully and explicitly. Indeed, it is the central concept in Cassirer's philosophy which unites its diverse aspects and by which he identifies it

52

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

in the title of his main work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, is "symbolic form." In nontechnical terms, it can be thought of as a worldview or perspective made through symbols. The possession of symbolic forms separates the human world from the animal environment. Each form does not copy sensible data but has its own power to change mere impressions into expressions, and each one creates a specific or particular image-world. There is a distinction between worldview and perspective. In art, for example, a painting can be made of any physical phenomenon and even emotions or events can be represented; to this extent it constitutes not exactly a worldview, in the sense that it would be enough to conduct life in all its aspect as appears to have been the case at one time with regard to primitive thinking, but rather a perspective or attitude in which any phenomenon of experience can be symbolized. To be a symbolic form, a cultural activity must meet three criteria. First, it must have its own symbolism (PSF I, 86); secondly, it must have an inner logic or form for all its created symbols; and thirdly, it must have a dialectic or characteristic change in its symbols leading to a different type. Myth has its distinctive kind of symbols and images, which may be physical objects; language has words and sentences, which may convey the feeling of the objects they represent as in onomatopeia, or more generally in the tendency of any words to convey feeling and to have connotations; science has its explicitly created symbols not directly modeled on or resembling physical objects but which give an explicit form to their intuited relationships, as the color spectrum orders the visible phenomena of light without, however being copied from any actual experience. This progression in symbolism, at first glance an apparent kind of increasing abstraction, shows an increasing ability to construct the basic units by which we order our world. Another requirement is that any symbolic form should have a law to explain the making of any and all of its symbols. This unity is its "inner logic" or "inner form" (PSF I, 81) or "inner formative principle." What might be called its outer form is the symbolism through which the unique forming power builds its aspect of human experience. The most distinctive trait of a symbolic form is the way it orders experience. In Cassirer's view this formative power is unique, and still it potentially applies to any immediate sensible data (EM 72 and 158). Making a further observation, Susanne Langer pointed out that the masterstroke of Cassirer's philosophy is to make symbols constitutive of experience ("On Cassirer's Theory . . ." (393). Previously, it had been assumed that people have

Myth Starts a Philosophy of Culture

53

experience through the senses and then they decide to change some of this knowledge by making it mean something different. In Cassirer's terms symbols are "organs of reality," meaning that it is only through them that a world can be created; they are constructs and they lead to more organized ones by their very natures (LM 8-9). Any and all data from the senses are formed according to particular, evolving ways of knowing the world. Thirdly, in addition to having a unique formative power, any symbolic form has an inner tension, dualism, polarity, or dialectic characterizing the whole form and being the source of its development ("'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy," in PEC, 880). It may be considered that there is a fourth requirement, that any symbolic form is applicable to any data whatsoever, but this is better thought as part of the requirement that there be an inner forming power which can symbolize anything in the world. An early definition of "symbolic form" occurs in a 1921 essay ("Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften" or "The Concept of Symbolic Form in the Construction of the Cultural Sciences"): "Under the term 'symbolic form' should be understood each energy of human spirit through which an intelligible content and meaning is joined with and internally adpated to a concrete sensible sign" ("Cassirer," The Encyclopedic Dictionary of Semiotics, ed. Sebeok). Verene clarifies this idea by pointing out that another way to look at the idea of the joining of spirit and sense is to see spirit as realized or expressed in a sensible sign it can mold even further ("Cassirer's 'Symbolic Form' " 294). As Carl Hamburg noticed, the concept of "symbolic form" is generally used in three ways (Symbol and Reality 58): it refers to symbols, the type of consciousness using them, or to categories of ordering aspects of our world, such as space, time, number, among others to be defined in relation to myth. The autonomy of the symbolic forms is an often mentioned requirement of each one's existence and of the unity of the whole system of the philosophy of culture. "They tend in different directions and obey different principles" (EM 228). In this whole system myth has a crucial role, because it is the first and because others definitely seem to replace it (PSF II, xiv-xv). There is an answer to the important question why Cassirer chooses to theorize about myth. He can use it to build a system of symbolic forms, myth seeming to provide the first type of forming the world by

54

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

means of symbols and perhaps being a kind of model or at least testing ground preliminary to the study of the other symbolic forms. It remains to be seen what the symbolism, inner form, and dialectic of myth are. This is the topic of the next chapter, which will complete the first stage of his understanding of myth and lead the way to more general ideas that will change the way he views myth. NOTES 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12

13

Extract from "Ernst Cassirer at Seventy," Aufbau, July 28, 1944, reprinted on 240 of "Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics" by Cassirer. "Vico and Cassirer" 4. Kirk, Myth 263. Strenski, "Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought in Weimar Culture," 363. "Symbol According to Cassirer & Langer," 655. "Ernst Cassirer," Twentieth-Century Authors 179. PEC 53. "Myth, Symbolism, and Truth," 381. Segal, JC 2. See Cassirer's Geschichte der Antiken Philosophie, which is Part I of Lehrbuch der Philosophic Die Geschichte der Philosophic Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932), Vol. 1, paragraph 339. Hereinafter cited by the volume and paragraph number, e.g. (1.339). See the third volume of his history of philosophy (the title in English of the untranslated work is "The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of the Modern Age: The Post-Kantian Systems" (Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuren Zeit: Die NachKantischen Systeme). The problematic idea in Hegel's works is in The Science of Logic, Vol. II, p. 486. "In so far as this externality [space and time] is only in accordance with the abstract immediacy of Being, and is comprehended by consciousness, it exists as mere objectivity and external life; but in the Idea it remains, in and for itself, the totality of the Notion, and Philosophy [remains] related to Nature as divine knowledge." From Das Erkenntnisproblem see pages 376-77. For a discussion see my Ph.D. thesis, "The Unity of Culture in Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy," The Pennsylvania State University, 1980.

CHAPTER 3

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1 Its Symbolism in Perception and Imagination "The Urcrisis [primordial crisis] out of which the mythical consciousness arises is precisely that of having a world at all" (Stephen A. Erickson 257).

Cassirer's theory of myth is unique. The previous chapter claims that part of the uniqueness is its philosophical character. Since Cassirer's is one of the first philosophies of myth and even to this day perhaps the most detailed, its methods must be considered when comparing his view to that of others. This chapter begins the presentation of his extended definition of myth as a worldview or symbolic form by discussing the symbolism. THE IMPORTANCE OF SYMBOLISM FOR A THEORY OF MYTH A Broad Definition of Myth and Its Symbolism From the start it is clear how much broader this definition is than many common approaches from whatever field that define myth as a tale, story, fanciful theory. For Cassirer, myth includes tales but also dreams, percepts, intuitions, concepts, actions, and the active mind that weaves all of these into an entire social system and way of life. Cassirer wants to find a single pattern that would be present in all the experiences and that could be said to produce them. To be such a pattern, worldview, or symbolic form, any cultural activity must satisfy three criteria: it must create its own symbols, must have a distinctive way in which they are produced, which he calls its logic or inner form, and it must have a characteristic development called dialectic, an integration of ideas into truer, more universal ones. These last two criteria will be discussed in the next chapters. 55

56

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Myth includes much more than tales, in Cassirer's philosophy. It is a worldview including the acts of forming it and the products. The range of mythical symbols is correspondingly broad. If they are listed in a developmental sequence, which Cassirer does not try to do, the list of symbols would in general be the following: sensations, dreams, actions, percepts, physical objects, tools, cave drawings, natural phenomena, the human body, any living thing, words and sentences, numbers, forms of social organization, rites, myths, and mythology (systems of myths). From this list it is clear that a symbol is not only an isolated particular thing, it is a term for the unity of many related symbols. A symbol can be the unity of many symbols. The Unity of Myth Is Not Definable by Only One of Its Symbols Taboos, totem poles, scapegoats, mana, human sacrifices, cannibalism, and fertility rites are among the standard fare of myth theory. Any of these products of symbolism can serve well to define myth in one of its particular aspects, and subsequent chapters include detailed accounts of his interpretation. Cassirer rejects the attempt by some researchers to explain myth by defining its unity according to one symbol. For some, it is mana, the omnipresent force, which seems to be in every mythical culture and so it is thought must be a universal feature (PSF 75-76). For others, it is the moon, or the idea of taboo, and so on. Cassirer does admit that some symbols with variations seem to be found in seemingly all cultures (EM 85), yet, if the unity of myth is found in one of its elements, the unity would be lost. The unity must be broader, more inclusive than any element if it is to be a worldview, and there must be an explanation for the development of the symbols. Furthermore, the full understanding of mana and taboo requires an understanding of the perspective by which they are thought because part of their content is this perspective (PSF II, 77-78). Partially, the validity of Cassirer's argument results from the approach of his field, since different fields do not try to understand myth as a form of thinking. Nevertheless, by asking the question of a unique type of thinking, Cassirer is able to explain myth in some respects more deeply than other researchers or at least more deeply as a type of consciousness.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

57

Symbols Are Not Arbitrary for a Human World Cassirer believes that symbols are necessary to have a human world. Since the meaning consists of a suggestion of relations to other things beyond a symbol, the mind can consider merely possible relations, absent objects, changes in present objects, future actions, the unity of many objects, and can know its own processes through its works (PSF II, 259). Without symbols, there could be no self-consciousness, though it is only developing in a rudimentary form in myth. Symbols Have a Material Basis or Substrate; Idealism Is Not Anti-Materialistic Cassirer insists that symbols have a material basis or substratum (PSF I, 86). This claim is obvious when it comes to the range of cultural artifacts—to tools, cave paintings, clothes, and so on. It also applies to natural phenomena, for humans can only relate to them as symbols of some kind. A tree may become a sacred pole, but even as a tree left in the forest the human can give it a name, can talk about it, can draw a picture of it, and can use it for a fire. The tree is not a physical object in the sense of provoking one behavioral response, but it has a potentially unlimited number of ways in which it can be related to other things. This freedom of power increases through the advance of civilization. Cassirer's requirement also applies to dreams and images in the mind. Although they may have no representation outside the body they are capable of being so represented by means of our senses. Even if they are not, however, they are represented in our minds by remembered emotions attached to the present kinaesthetic awareness; I can imagine a fast animal in a hunt and it can have meaning because at the time I am imagining it I have emotions or feelings in my body to correspond to the situation. In dreams we feel emotions and emotions are always copresent with at least slight changes in the muscles, various glands, body temperature, sense of the environment's temperature, bodily position, and other data about the body. The Special Correlation of the Mythical Symbol with Perception Being the first type of human thought, myth cannot be expected to have developed abstract concepts or ways of thinking anything like what is meant by them today. Cassirer understands the special contribution of myth to be linked with perception; that is to say, humans have from the

58

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

start a different kind of perception than animals do and in myth this characteristic ability is developed through the symbolism. In the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer correlates the symbolism of myth especially though not exclusively with perception; the symbolism of language more so with intuition (formation of relations such as space, time, and number needed for action); and the symbolism of science with conception, which orders the physical world as a whole but which no longer has a one-to-one correspondence of each concept with a physical thing. Of course each symbolic form has its own mode of perception, intuition, and conception to complete its worldview, but some forms seem to be more associated with one of the three aspects of knowledge. As a result the mythical symbol, the image, depends more on the five senses and the feeling in the body than do modern scientific symbols, which tend to be relations or variables dependent for their meaning on a greater number of and on more complex associations. Cassirer describes the mythical experience enough to allow computer scientists to create a virtual reality system in which the perception could almost be experienced. The distinctive perception of primitives is described in more detail below in the discussion of the image. In general Cassirer cites developmental psychologists who through experiments have determined the whole mythical perceptual field to be "diffuse and complex," i.e. to have a "lack of differentiation and organization" (PSF III, 61). Combined with his idea that things are perceived as expressive qualities, the whole perceptual field would then be an animated picture, having many details though lacking in a possible schema of their relationships; in other words, no map can be drawn, the relationships are not quantifiable, not determinable by an abstract coordinate system. As a way of introducing Cassirer's mythical perception, it can be put into the context of two other main kinds: the empirical and the scientific. Primitives merely feel relations between things and hypostatize them as a separate new substance; the cause of a disease would be a demon (PSF II, 26). In the empirical worldview, relations are more conscious, explicit, analytical, and permanent—more symbolical. They are known by sensuous similarity or contiguity. The redness of a ball and its softness and its roundness are spatially and temporally together, though there is no idea why they should be. The scientific mind, according to Cassirer, has symbols that are the furthest from perception. It knows its symbols to be consciously created, and the relationships among them are deduced from general laws. Not only can it specify relations in perception analyt-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

59

ically, but it also can explain their origin, whereas in the ordinary empirical worldview of daily behavior this is not possible to this degree and in this way. Symbols Show the Unique Features of Primitive Consciousness Some symbols and attitudes toward symbols can be found only in the mythical worldview. While Cassirer does not make a definite list of the distinctive features, a list can be made to show the importance of an analysis of symbolism for an understanding of a type of thinking. Some nonsensory qualities are detachable and transferable to another object; a magician's power can be transferred by selling his equipment (PSF II, 58). One thing can be in two places at the same time; a rain god is in each drop of rain and in the drops sprinkled to make it rain (PSF III, 68). Images are not mere representations but forces and essences; a photograph can steal the essence of someone. Many mythical symbols are indifferent to the distinction between meaning and being, mind and body, idea and thing, image and reality; for example, knowing the name of a god permits some control over the god (PSF II, 41). In mythical symbolism, everything has an expressive or emotional quality—even the numbers of the Pythagoreans were thought to be sacred and have ethical qualities of balance and harmony. Nonsensory ideas can only be understood as modified sensory traits; in the cross, Cassirer claims, the number 4 is venerated as a form or shape but could not be venerated or known without some sensory trait (PSF II, 147); similarly, in ancient Egyptian culture the sense of an afterlife is only conceivable when combined with a sensory shape—the form of the pyramids (PSF II, 128). A single mythical symbol tends to include other symbols, even of different types; the cross represented the directions of the earth, the regions of heaven, the human body, the religious doctrine, and the number four. Mythical symbols undergo constant metamorphosis (people are thought to change into animals or gods) and there are heterogeneous combinations of symbols (half-woman, half-lion, and wings). According to the principle of pars pro toto, a symbol is confused with the whole to which it belongs(PSF II, 111); if a person does something wrong, the whole community is equally to blame as if it shared a kind of evil contagion. Mythical symbols are fairly unconscious, or merely felt; there is no sense that their reality needs to be confirmed or corroborated, any more than the feeling of water being hot would need to be. Finally, a mythical symbol implies a value distinction, whereas in postmythical experience symbols are more

60

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

neutral. An example is the distinction between day and night, light and darkness, which is transposed into myths with the expressive value of goodness and evil, for example, in the Babylonian creation myth the hero brings about a victory of the light (PSF II, 96). THE START OF MYTHICAL SYMBOLISM: FROM ANIMAL SIGNAL TO HUMAN SYMBOL The Three Traits of All Symbolisms Chapter 2 presented some features of all symbolism in Cassirer's philosophy; namely, the systematic nature of symbols (naturally belonging in groups) and their reflexive nature (mirroring the process of their own formation [PSF II, 189]). The capacity of symbols to function as mirrors makes possible self-consciousness. In addition, all symbols are (1) universally applicable, (2) variable through imagination or expressive of different possibilities, (4) designated in thought (EM 38-40). These traits can be defined in the following ways. To say that mythical symbols are universally applicable is to say that there is no object which could not be symbolized in some way by a primitive or that everything in the worldview is a symbol. To say that the symbols are variable through the imagination is to say that a symbol can be applied to more than one thing without confusion; the symbol of a parrot can refer to a primordial ancestor, a physical bird, or the spirit of a people, whether any of these happen to be copresent with a drawing of the parrot or the word for it or some feathers. To say that mythical symbols are designated in thought means that "there is an objective reference and meaning" (EM 29), or that there are no merely private symbols; all have potentially public meaning and are objects of thought, ideas in the world. The same ideas toward the parrot occur in a culture so that they are not merely subjective reactions (EM 83). These three traits allow humans to weave sensations and percepts into a fabric of meaning by which a person can live in a world, the prerogative of human beings. The way primitives do this, it should be noted briefly now, is different from more advanced forms. Primitive symbols are less universal, less variable, and less designated—in short less symbolic—than are the symbols of advanced science. In Cassirer's view, the way a ritual is done is fixed, rigid, nonvariable (EM 36-37). At first the ritual is more a sequence of actions than it is a set of ideas shared by all the people. Then, when a myth is developed as its explanation, the ac-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

61

tions become objects of thought to a greater degree. The world becomes more articulated, analytical. These three features can be more clearly seen when they are lost through injury or sickness in the modern world than they can in the case of the healthy primitive just acquiring symbolism, when the light of symbolism, to speak metaphorically, is still dim and then easily misinterpreted by the brighter light of our modern mind. The Diminished Ability to Symbolize Cassirer illustrates the positive features of symbolism by discussing cases in which they are obviously absent. He philosophizes about a group of disorders which he called symbolic: aphasia, which is a disorder of using language; apraxia, a disorder of action, and agnosia, a disorder of perceiving and recognizing objects.1 'Aphasia," the partial loss of the ability to use classes of words, is a selective handicap, affecting only part of a person's life, which may be nearly indistinguishable from that of a normal person. Afflicted with aphasia, one patient who could write only with his left hand could not utter, "I can write with my right hand." The understanding of what is merely possible is impaired. 'Apraxia," also a selective handicap, describes the loss or impairment of the ability to perform complex coordinated movements. A patient could hammer a nail into the wall but could not move his arm in that motion when he was too far from the nail to hit it. Here the nail and the wall and the hammer lose their status as designated objects, that is, objects which have a meaning apart from the immediate use which can be made of them; they have meaning as an object of thought, not a mere component of present action. "Agnosia" means the impaired perception and recognition of objects. One patient having agnosia mistook an umbrella for a leafy plant, and at another time he thought it was a pencil. A brightly colored apple, one patient thought, was the portrait of a lady. In these examples the universal applicability of words is confused. When patients have symbolic disorders, their worldview becomes fragmented, disconnected, less conceptual, perhaps smaller. One with aphasia could only imagine parts of an object, a lion. He failed to picture the whole lion, because whenever he tried to picture another part of the object he would forget the first part. Another aphasiac who was shown a picture of a lion and then asked to describe it could state the color of the head and the mane but forgot what the legs looked like. Sir Henry Head had several aphasiacs who could not understand a whole paragraph, for

62

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

when they got to the middle they would forget the beginning. It is Cassirer's view that the first form of human experience—not unlike early experiences of the first years of childhood, is much more momentary and fragmented than that which modern people experience today. It is only through the development of more symbols and of more advanced ones that individual moments of experience can be seen to be less dreamlike and to belong to a more enduring continuum of reality. In addition to an inability to synthesize perceptions, there is an inability to schematize behavior and the world. An aphasiac able to follow a route home from the hospital could not name the streets. An apraxic able to follow a sketch of this hospital room could not sketch it, and in severe cases he would mistake the situation of his bed in the room or the location of his room in the hospital. A person with agnosia at The Neurological Institute of Frankfort could not understand the size of angles, for he would always say that the angle with the larger sides was larger. In addition, he could not lay an object parallel to another on a table unless the two objects touched. His problem was not that his senses were impaired; rather, he could not form a schema, retain it in his mind, and react to his environment while using the schema. Although the schema of course is not a physical thing, healthy people see Schemas in the arrangement of furniture in their rooms or in the placement of objects on a table: their perception has symbolic pregnance or suggests nonsensory traits. Besides the inability to synthesize perceptions and the inability to schematize behavior, patients with symbolic disorders have a reduced capacity for regarding things as objects of thought: they have difficulty in establishing a reference point and in shifting meanings according to new points. One aphasiac could not sketch a plan of his room, because he did not know how to choose a starting point or a point to which the other objects in the room referred. The use of metaphors requires this ability to find a point, an object, and transfer a meaning from another word to it. Most aphasiacs could not perform actions that their doctor did when they were sitting face to face. When they could see the actions reflected in a mirror, however, they could perform them, because they would not have to interpose a linguistic transtion such as "Doctor Head's right arm is my left one." Like the apes that could not get a banana down with a stick if they were not in the same glance, these patients' ability to form symbols was impaired. A patient of Kurt Goldstein (a German researcher in neurology) could not think of the nail as a symbol. He could hammer a nail into a wall, but whenever the nail was taken away, he could not make the motion. People

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

63

with apraxia could not perform "symbolic acts" such as blowing a piece of paper when the paper to be blown was out of reach or could not act as if they were knocking when the door to be touched was out of reach. In this phrase "symbolic acts" "symbolic" refers to these qualities: (1) the variability of the reaction to the paper and the door; (2) the imaginary qualities of each, (3) the function of the paper and the door to be something designated, rather than something causing behavior. A fly causes a spider to move. Because the patient can knock on the door if it is within reach, the ability to represent space is not totally absent but rather impaired, having shifted from an optical representation to an internal feeling. The optical representation, independent of a physical thing, would permit a person to knock even when a door was not in reach. Behavior is less variable when space in internally represented, when it is defined by an awareness of the muscles needed to knock on the door, than when space is represented optically and projected outward to define what we see and can do. When represented optically, the awareness depends partially on the imagined impact of hand on the door. If the door is not within reach, the impact cannot form part of the intention; something is missing. An apraxic cannot imagine various relations of his body to the door, because the mode of imagination has become less variable, more restricted and limited. One apraxic always thought of "above" in terms of head; "below" in terms of feet. One apraxic, whom Goldstein helped and studied, could only write if the writing surface was at a right angle to the chest. Along with the fixed relation of human body to objects, when space is represented kinaesthetically, through muscular feeling, mediated actions are not possible, such a hitting indirect shots in billiards instead of straight ones. An apraxic partially loses behavioral freedom. An apraxic can use a spoon or cup during his meal but not at other times, just as a spider attacks a fly in its net but under other circumstanceflees.Though people with symbolic disorders are handicapped, they are only partially affected. Cassirer's view of symbolism helps to explain how a war veteran shot in the head seemed to have a smaller or more restricted world. He could talk about street sweeping, though not about politics. A world can become smaller, the imagination can become restricted, if the means of imagining becomes poorer. Representation solely by muscular feeling reduces, if not eliminates, the ability to shift back and forth between a particular object and a generalized schema of objects, a worldview or the groundplan of a hospital room. To provide evidence for his view that the defining trait of human actions is symbolism, Cassirer wrote at length about these symbolic

64

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

disorders, these disorders which manifest a difference between animal functions and the exclusively human. The difference is the possession of a behavioral freedom in relation to physical objects. The behavior of people with the disorders is closer to life, as opposed to thought; closer to action, as opposed to conception. By gaining a behavioral freedom in relation to physical objects, we escape the imprisonment of experience confined merely in an environment; we gain the freedom of members of an ongoing human civilization. This discussion of the main features of all symbolism makes it easier to see the human qualities of somewhat indistinct mythic symbols. The Achilpa, who centered their world on a sacred pole had a low level of symbolism because their social organization depended on the actual physical presence of a wooden pole (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 33 ff.). Since their daily activities would cease if the pole were destroyed, their formation of a world was rather tenuous. It was much closer to mere animal existence than the modern is. It is only through symbols that a general perspective on particular things can be maintained. The Distinction between Signals and Symbols On Cassirer's view, there is a distinction between signals and symbols. Animals can never use symbols. The distinction is also the distinction between the animal environment and the human world. This distinction is significant for defining myth as a symbolic form, because it helps explain what a world is. A signal is an operator; a symbol a designator (EM 32). To designate means to assign an objective existence to, to give significance to, to see as part of a world. A signal is part of "the physical world of being"; a symbol, a part of "the human world of meaning." In a cartoon one dog was talking to another, expressing disinterest, while their master was reading a book, and then said, "It's no fun. All the pages smell the same." For dogs, a book is not something merely to be designated or to be assigned meaning and considered without any overt action. Dogs and all animals live in an environment which is much smaller than a world in space and in time and in memory. Experiments have shown, according to Cassirer, that animals have some sense of spatial and temporal relations; humans, however, can isolate them and reflect on them even when they are of no immediate practical use (EM 38-40). Also, animal behavior depends almost exclusively on sensation, perception, and some memory, whereas human behavior depends much more on the accumulated memory of the entire human race across generations.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

65

In An Essay on Man Cassirer goes to some lengths to define the differences between animal and human, and this discussion is valuable for a discussion of mythic symbolism, which marks the boundary. Adapting some of the concepts of the theoretical biologist Johannes von Uexkiill, Cassirer expands his ideas of a unified effector-receptor system of the animal's integration into its type of environment by adding a delay in this instinctive and sensory process: the symbol. 2 It acts as a kind of delay, or what Langer calls a transformer. Humans do not have to smell the book; they do not have to pick it up with their mouth; they can read it or not, as they like; they can judge it favorably or harshly; in fact, they have an indefinite number of attitudes toward the book, whereas we can really only speak of a response on the part of animals, not an attitude. Symbols obviate any dualism between mind and body, inner and outer, because they are from the start mediators (PSF II, 156). When the human process of symbolism is interfered with, deteriorated, then the human behavior begins to resemble the animal. A surprising light is thrown on many of the symptoms of aphasia, agnosia, and apraxia, when instead of measuring them by the standard of normal behavior we choose a norm drawn from a relatively simpler biological stratum. An apractic uses his spoon or cup properly if it is given him during a meal but fails to recognize them or use them appropriately at other times. The behavior of animals often provides striking analogies to this phenomenon. We recall the spider which immediately attacks a gnat or fly that flies into its net in the usual way but runs away from it if the encounter takes place under unusual circumstances. The sand wasp does not carry its prey directly into its hole but first drops it to inspect the hole, and repeats the visit as many as thirty or forty times if this customary action sequence is interrupted by outside intervention (PSF III, 276). What the neurologically disabled person loses is something that the primitive succeeded in developing above the ability of animals. The aphasiac or apractic seems to have been thrust one step backward along this path which mankind had to open up by slow, steady endeavor. Everything that is purely mediated has in some way become unintelligible to him; everything that is not tangible, not directly present, evades both his thinking and his will. Even though he can still apprehend and in general correctly handle what is 'real', concretely

66

Cassirer and Langer on Myth present, and momentarily necessary, he lacks the spiritual view into the distance, the vision of what is not before his eyes, of the merely possible. Pathological behavior has in a sense lost the power of the intellectual impulse which forever drives the human spirit beyond the sphere of what is immediately perceived and desired (PSF III, 277).

One thing that Cassirer means when he says that animals live in an environment and humans in a world is that animals are confined to the here and now, to their senses, and to comparatively invariable responses to their environment. Cassirer believes symbolism is capable of indefinite improvement into new types and, because it does, both human feeling and the world lived in will vary, too. Animals have stayed in their environments, their jungles; humans have left them, built cities, and literally changed the world to be a human one; animal species are disappearing and nature is being replaced with human products. Animals do not take an active role in changing their environment in the same sense that humans do when they make symbols. Important topics for distinguishing animal from human intelligence are language and perception. Can't animals use language in some sense? Don't they see the same things that people see? This is very relevant to a discussion of myth, because it is sometimes wondered what the primitive actually sees or hears. Surely it must be the same as what modern people do. Cassirer's answer is that animals only use "sounds expressing sensation. They are not 'significant' in the sense of being correlated as signs with definite things and happenings in the outside world" (PSF III, 109). They do not belong to a larger complex of meaning, they do not suggest the "not here" and the "not now," and they do not assert something to be considered apart from any role in immediate action. Concerning the question of animal perception Cassirer writes, Modern Gestalt psychology . . . has shown that the very simplest perceptual processes imply fundamental structural elements, certain patterns or configurations. This principle holds both for the human and the animal world. Even in comparatively low stages of animal life the presence of these structural elements—especially of spatial and optical structures—has been experimentally proved. The mere awareness of relations cannot, therefore, be regarded as a specific feature of human consciousness. We do find, however, in man a special type of relational thought which has no parallel in the animal world. In man an ability to isolate relations—to consider them in their abstract meaning—has de-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

67

veloped. In order to grasp this meaning man is no longer dependent upon concrete sense data, upon visual, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic data. He considers these relations 'in themselves'.... Geometry is the classic example of this turning point in man's intellectual life (EM 38).

Animals can function in space and seem to belong to the same network of relations: both a dog and a human would go around a chair instead of bumping into it, but the dog's behavior is really only a biochemical and conditioned response toward it while the human's is a matter of attitude and imagination. In general animals seem to express and to communicate attitudes, perhaps of anger, joy, affection, among others (EM 29). What we interpret on the basis of our world, however, is only an action confined to an effector-receptor system of the animal. A dog cannot display anger without being in a state of anger whereas a human can do it so as to show it to someone else and contemplate it or to use it for a different purpose than just to be a warning in the immediate situation. Animals can never really be actors; if they do learn tricks, the behavior is a practical food-getting activity, for there is little danger that a dog would start its own theatre company. This discussion about the distinction between the animal and the human is useful for making clear Cassirer's definition of a symbol and for explaining where myth comes from and what it achieves. It is difficult to appreciate the claim that humans can never see anything, never hear anything, and so on, that is not formed in some particular way and that is not symbolic in Cassirer's sense. Even ordinary physical objects that are not used, say, for religious worship nonetheless have a symbolic and "spiritual" dimension seemingly forever denied to animals. Cassirer explains this fundamental idea of his when speaking about religion: "For the religious significance of an event depends no longer on its content but solely on its form; what gives it its character as a symbol is not what it is and whence it immediately comes but the spiritual aspect in which it is seen, the relation to the universe which it obtains in religious feeling and thought" (PSF II, 252). Most discussions of mythical consciousness choose the spiritual products involving religion or art or science but even a rock picked up to throw at an animal is a nascent tool use, which animals never do develop. Tools are symbols, as are materials to make things, or even animals to be domesticated for food and work. To use a stick as a tool to get a banana down, if the stick is not next to the banana, requires that what the stick is for the senses has been adapted to become a symbol and is understood as

68

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

having a significance for something that is not immediately within reach or within the field of vision. A world is an imaginatively extended and united environment. The universe is still a small one when primitives start to use tools, but the gap between animal and human intelligence at that stage already seems to be insurmountable for the animal. Symbols Designate Objects and Are Organs of Knowledge Two key functions of symbolism should be mentioned before turning to details of mythic symbolism. For Cassirer, all symbols assert some reality (designate) and they are means of acquiring further knowledge—organs of knowing, not just things known. There must be some truth to symbols even the wildest creations of myth because the symbol is created as a medium, delay, or transformer between inner feeling and outward stimuli. The symbol could only occur as the guarantee of the preestablished harmony in general, though particular mistakes could occur. In agreement with Heinrich Hertz, Cassirer writes, "We make 'inner fictions or symbols' of outward objects, and these symbols are so constituted that the necessary logical consequences of the images are always images of the necessary natural consequences of the imaged objects" (PSF I, 75). Cassirer does not believe primitives never make mistakes; rather, the preestablished harmony is the order of mythic symbolism and the world. An image is an index of the relation of inner feeling and outward stimuli in a greater context of other such images. One of Aesop's fables can illustrate how symbols have within them the means to change our knowledge. According to Aesop, one day a dog that stole a piece of meat from a butcher shop wanted to go to a safe place to eat it. Walking on a footbridge over a clear stream, it looked down to see another dog with a piece of meat. The dog snarled, tried to grab the other piece, only to lose its own and watch the other piece disappear amid the dog's confusion. The moral, according to Aesop, is this: it is better to keep the substance than to grasp at a shadow. Should the dog reencounter its image in the water, it might take some time before it could "learn" not to bark at it, but in any case it would not really recognize an image of itself, or even an image to reflect on, something not an immediate part of the physical environment. It would not extend the recognition to other cases in which it "sees" the image of itself, say in a window or mirror. Animals do not respond to perceptual data as images or symbols but only as direct physical stimuli in relationship to which a response may or may not occur.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

69

The human response is different: one symbol can lead people to reenvision their whole world, though usually changes in perspective occur on a smaller scale. The occasion of the mistake can alter a person's behavior not only in this one instance but in many similar instances and eventually changes could result in all behavior. There can be a generalized difference in behavior toward the world. The single image in the water can serve to represent a whole complex of behavior and meanings, and any complex is relatable to any other; the animal cannot do this— cannot have an attitude and a world. The animal cannot have a symbol. Any single symbol can be a paraclete for thought to change its entire attitude and thus to reenvision the world. Without this human capacity there could be no civilization, no transmission and accumulation of learning across generations of people. [As a feature essential to symbolism,] a certain partial content of consciousness, though distinct from the whole, retained the power to represent this whole and in so doing to reconstitute it in a sense. A present content possessed the power of evoking another content, which was not immediately given but merely conveyed by it. It is not the case, however, that the symbolic signs which we encounter in language, myth, and art first 'are' and then, beyond this 'being', achieve a certain meaning; their being arises from their signification. Their content subsists purely and wholly in the function of signification. Here consciousness, in order to apprehend the whole in the particular, no longer requires the stimulus of the particular itself, which must be given as such; here consciousness creates definite concrete sensory contents as an expression for definite complexes of meaning. And because these contents which consciousness creates are entirely in its power, it can, through them, freely "evoke" all those meanings at any time (PSF I, 106)

This passage explains what is symbolized in anything: a complex of meanings greater than the individual thing, part of a perspective on the world, which must be considered part of the act of knowing. Furthermore, this fable may make clearer what Cassirer means when he claims that symbols show us the manner of their formation so that there can be progress in knowledge and human culture: "In each one of its freely projected signs the human spirit apprehends the object and at the same time apprehends itself and its own formative law. And this peculiar interpenetration prepares the way for the deeper determination

70

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

both of subject and object" (PSF I 92). For Cassirer, the formative law of symbolism is always the unity that can be found in the process of symbolism: "For what defines each particular content of consciousness is that in it the whole of consciousness is in some form posited and represented. Only in and through this representation does what we call the 'presence' of the content become possible" (PSF I, 98). In another passage myths are described as essentially vehicles of self-knowledge because they show the form of human practices (LM 41). If myths show the form of human practices, then myths are true— not as the modern mind would say ''literally" but spiritually. An example to be discussed fully later in this chapter is that of a symbol of the center of the world, a wooden pole, which when broken no longer enabled the primitives to function in their daily lives, since it had determined the organization of the social life by being the central image in a myth about the identity of the culture. Modern thinkers would say the myth of a hero climbing the pole to ascend into heaven is literally false, yet it must be admitted that it did have the spiritual truth of giving the people their social organization. In the terms of contemporary literary criticism, the myth is "performative" of the actual cultural organization without being a representation literally true.3 THE SYMBOL OF THE MYTHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE IMAGE The Success of Myth One methodological problem in theories of myth is that most scholars try to think "backward"; try to understand a less advanced human behavior and so it is difficult to fight the tendency to regard myth in a negative light—as primitive, savage, irrational. The methodological expectations tend to come true. If, however, the mythical worldview is viewed as an advancement on the animal kingdom, as a momentous step to a human universe, then many of its phenomena can be seen not only in a positive but a new light. According to Cassirer's line of thinking, the creations of myth should not so much be judged by an external world which we have come to believe in and which we expect primitives to do so, too; rather, the truth and meaning of the creations should be judged according to the world that they succeed in building up—a world that did not exist before myth. Mythic symbols are building blocks of a human universe and it is

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

71

clear that Cassirer wants to determine their meaning by the immanent criteria of their formation, not by assumptions of our world anachronistically used to explain the backwardness. Cassirer argues that the image is the symbol of the mythical consciousness; it forms the basis of all its symbolism. Myth can create single points of meaning out of the somewhat indistinct perceptual field (LM 33). Their relative lack of connection by comparison to more modern thought also contributes to their relative fluidity and momentary quality (PSF II, 77). Then eventually they coalesce into complexes of images and feelings, forming rituals and later myths. Campbell believed that the image was so much more predominant that he prepared The Mythic Image as "largely a set of pictures themselves," an idea Robert Segal discusses in his introduction (82). The image is very different from the word of language and the abstract symbol of modern science. The differences should be seen both synchronically and diachronically. Synchronically, images and words are used along side scientific symbols today even though the three types are very different. Diachronically, it is clear that an image is more isolated than a word, which in its turn is more isolated than a scientific symbol. Numbers, for example, are more integral to a homonenous series than the more heterogenous units of language. This difference shows an evolutionary advance in symbolism from isolated ideas to greater relatedness and articulated expression of the world's unity. The image, too, is less mental, more physical than the other two main types of symbols which Cassirer speaks of in many contexts as the predominant types. In the case of early primitive cultures, the symbols are what we would call natural phenomena and also sensations. The connection between heaven and earth, spiritual and physical could only be felt if it were felt through an object, as in the case of the Achilpa who needed a sacred pole. Only after thousands of years of symbolizing are people able to create the symbols of modern physics which do not resemble anything physical they represent. Words still do that to some extent in the cases of onomatopeia and feeling inevitably associated with different word choices. This connection with the body and immediate environment is loosened even more in the case of modern science. The consequence is important for the interpretation of myth. This fact shows us that the mythic image gives a new kind of freedom from the environment that animals can never experience—a freedom that leads to the greater control over it and the continued development of new

72

Cassirer and hanger on Myth

inner attitudes. At the same time, however, the freedom won by the mythic image is not much at all if we take the standards achieved millenia later. This freedom can be discussed in other ways as well. It is true that by our standards primitives seem confined to the present moment of experience (EM 32). In this confinement primitives often feel emotions toward the images they form: fear, desire, awe, aggression, humour, and so on. Expressive qualities, Cassirer believes, are essential to images as mirrors of a co-emerging sense of the primitive's own abilities. The image is a way of creating a world by stabilizing the flux of sensations into "punctiform units" (LM 91); Cassirer also calls it "hypostatization," which is a concentration of feeling and a projection of the immediately experienced situation into one point enabling it to become an object of thought (LM 56). This process essential to the mythical way of thinking is described in the following passage: Where man attains to this mythic configuration of reality the various noises of reality no longer just impinge on him from outside. Rather, he begins to hold onto them as something constant and recurring. In his writings on the cults of the forest and fields, Mannhardt shows how a host of the figures with which mythic thinking populates the fields and meadows, the groves and bushes, originates thanks to such an emphasis, as they are formed from the rustling of the trees and of the foliage on the ground, from the groaning of the wind, and the whispering of the brook. Here too Herder sees one of the deepest roots of all mythical feeling and thought. 'Just as all nature makes sounds, so there is nothing more natural for sensuous people than to think that it is alive, speaks, and acts. Those wild peoples saw a tall tree with its astonishing crown and marveled: the crown resounds! That is an acting divinity! The primitive falls to the ground and worships it!' In such acts of adoration, of elevation to the divine, mankind does not remain 'passive' toward such existence. Individual voices are now singled out of this muffled confusion of voices, and the more that mythic interpretation progresses, the more that these voices, by remaining specific, come together to form a unity and a whole, the sound of a choir of spirits. The examination of the mythical world has of course showed us how slowly this process moves forward. In its early forms, there appear to be such developments that have no definite limits or individualization. Such developments as we find them in the Melanesian's mana,

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

73

the orenda of the Iroquois, the wakanda of the Sioux designate an indefinite composition rather than a clearly defined essence. They are not themselves demons, but a kind of designation for the demonic in general—for what is to be worshipped, for the fearsome, the terrible, the overpowering, the dangerous and threatening, the foreign and uncanny. If anywhere, we are standing within the sphere of expression, in a mythic feeling that is not yet differentiated, has not yet been concentrated to form particular configurations.4

The level of mythical consciousness here is lower than that in examples of symbols of the center of the world. What this passage presents is Cassirer's view that the mythic world begins with fairly isolated images, which gradually become more related. Their content consists of expressive qualities which stabilize the flux of momentary sensation by designating an identity, assigning a meaning to the wind or sounds that are heard. This process is unconscious or preconscious. The primitive does not say, "I hear the wind. Why don't we give it a personality." It is only centuries later that the wind can be thought of or remembered without any expressive quality representing it. Instead, the primitive can only think of the wind, remember it, discover its distinctive bearing on him/her, if it can be isolated in perception and stand out from the chaos. The image does this by giving the wind a place in a universe which has not yet been differentiated yet into natural forces and other personal wills. "The understanding of expression is essentially earlier than the knowledge of things" (PSF III, 63). Through the image there is "a transformation which removes a certain impression from the realm of the ordinary, the everyday and profane, and lifts it to the level of the 'holy', the sphere of mythico-religious 'significance' " (LM 88). Mythical symbolism is "unconscious" in the sense that a person does not understand the wind and then personify it as a second step. There is only one step in Cassirer's opinion (EM 74). Expression as the Main Characteristic of Mythical Images Cassirer concentrates on expression as the main feature of everything mythical. The mythical world is, as it were, at a much more fluid and fluctuating stage than our theoretical world of things and properties, of substances

74

Cassirer and Langer on Myth and accidents. In order to grasp and to describe this difference we may say that what myth primarily perceives are not objective but physiognomic [expressive] characters. Nature, in its empirical or scientific sense, may be defined as 'the existence of things as far as it is determined by general laws' [Kant, Prolegomena to Every Future Metaphysics, sec. 14]. Such a 'nature' does not exist for myths. The world of myth is a dramatic world—a world of actions, of forces, of conflicting powers. In every phenomenon of nature it sees the collision of these powers. Mythical perception is always impregnated with these emotional qualities. Whatever is seen or felt is surrounded by a special atmosphere—an atmosphere of joy or grief, of anguish, of excitement, of exultation or depression. Here we cannot speak of 'things' as a dead or indifferent stuff. All objects are benign or malignant, friendly or inimical, familiar or uncanny, alluring and fascinating or repellent and threatening (EM 77).

The best way to make sense out of expression is to remember what the symbol does. It is the smallest unit of a universe, which still does not differentiate between inner feeling and outward object, between society and nature. In making a universe possible, the images of the primitives show the manner of their formation, or they show new powers that they are developing. The mere reactions of animals become—for the primitive—designated forces in nature eventually leading the way to further reflection on them and greater understanding. The seeing of physiognomic traits in all of nature at the same time allows the primitive to begin forming a narrative of the identity of nature and his/her identity in nature. ("The self has no more than momentary reality without a narrative of itself which constantly lives below the surface of our actions." [Verene, The New Art ofAutobiography, 47]). In the fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, posthumously published in 1996, Cassirer explains the emergence of individual expressive characters from the total sensory-perceptual field of experience (70). This is possible because centers of attention are created in which the total feeling of the situation, inner and outer, is given form and remembered through some expressive quality. The symbol is to this extent a kind of a mnemonic device of an actual experience and at the same time a characterization of the total experience, albeit not in a complex way in which different aspects are expressed. The meaning of anything in myth is a feeling-unity. Part of the attitude of the primitive is unconsciously fused with what modern thinkers call the objective sensory

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

75

traits. It has often been noted that the experience of the child resembles quite strikingly that of primitives. Cassirer cites the psychologist Werner, who claims 'the child experiences spiritual-personal contents as concrete and corporeal'.5 The same process of forming a content of consciousness as a feeling-unity occurs in this example: 'When the first settlers arrived in Anvo, it is related that a man saw a giant baobab tree in the bush. At the sight of the tree he took fright. He therefore went to a priest for an interpretation of this occurrence. He was told that the baobab tree was a tro who wished to live with him and be worshipped by him. Thus fear was the sign by which the man recognized that a tro had been revealed to him' .6 The identity is known through an expressive quality in a kind of epitomization of the relation. Perhaps even earlier than the formation of images endowed with expressive qualities are expressive actions serving as symbols. Myth may consist "much more in actions than in mere images or representations" (EM 79). A final important feature of the mythical image should be mentioned. It helps lead the primitive to a more advanced level of consciousness and ultimately beyond it. Once momentary demons have been hypostatized and the stabilization of sensation has begun, more and more such images are made, remembered, and then begin to interact or become related. Cassirer describes at length theories of the evolution of primitive religion whenever he discusses myth at length. In philosophical terms the process is called "an ever-progressive objectification" (LM 36) meaning that the processes of forming symbols are progressively made apparent in the symbols. SYMBOLS MAKE THE FIRST WORLDVIEW OF HUMANITY A symbol of the center of the world can reveal what Cassirer means by a symbolism and how it gives a definite meaning to something so abstract and apparently amorphous as a worldview. Networks of symbols, however modest in scope and determinateness, are necessary for thought to occur. For example, there is one symbol of the center, a world ash tree in Nordic mythology, that "is represented as the tree with the right measure, the tree which gives the measure" (PSF II, 116). The tree almost has a proto-religious or proto-ethical function. At any rate it shows that that special symbol, the symbol of the center of a world, is the basis of judgments. As laws are necessary for political organization in modern societies, such symbols are equally necessary in primitive ones for order to

76

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

be possible. These considerations should serve to support Cassirer's view that a worldview has its criteria of truth within it. These must be considered when the meanings of ideas are. Symbols for the center of the cosmos are so common in early cultures that the apparent or actual universality provokes the need for explanation. I suggest an acausal connecting principle, like Jung's synchronicity. Isolated cultures used various symbols of the center because the primitive mind needs to express its unity and because we mythologists need to use some principles of unity to order the phenomena; neither the primitive mind causes us to see so many examples of symbols of the center, nor does our mind put them there anachronistically. Certain needs for finding unity and expressing it unite the most primitive people with the most modern mythologists. The first words for world such as "cosmos" mean order, and many myths represent the order that the primitives feel. The truth of the myths is expressive. This order is not found but is made and made in ever new ways, as Cassirer points out at the end of The Myth of the State: In Babylonian mythology we find a legend that describes the creation of the world. We are told that Marduk, the highest god, before he could begin his work had to fight a dreadful combat. He had to vanquish and subjugate the serpent Tiamat and the other dragons of darkness. He slew Tiamat and bound the dragons. Out of the limbs of the monster Tiamat he formed the world and gave to it its shape and its order. He made heaven and earth, the constellations and planets, and fixed their movements. His final work was the creation of man. In this way the cosmic order arose from the primeval chaos, and it will be preserved for all times. 'The word of Marduk', says the Babylonian epic of creation, 'is eternal; his command is unchangeable, no god can alter what proceeds from his mouth' (297).

In the same passage, it is clear that Cassirer suggests philosophy should be the modern Marduk to help bring about a new and better order today. Why this might be needed will be discussed in the chapter on the application of his theory. The ancient Greeks used "omphalos" to mean the center of the world but it also meant the navel of the body, which was represented as being the center of feeling and orientation (now it has moved to the head in modern society as the "control panel" of sensation); this same word

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

77

has come to mean "certain" (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane 47). The modern certainty is one of thinking, not of gut feeling. When we say that something makes sense, we often mean that the things in question fit together and can be related and unified. We also mean that there is some truth there. Myth is not just caprice or incoherent moments of consciousness, something like a drug experience might be. It does order its sensations into a world and it is successful enough to have led to better ways of doing this. These ideas preliminary to the discussion of symbolism suggest that there is a specific kind of reality in the mythical world and there is one only because the primitives create their feeling of it by ordering and unifying sensations to represent a single world. Whatever success in coping with the world that primitives have is a result of ordering inner and outer reality into a whole. The means of doing this, Cassirer claims, is symbolism. The Babylonian Epic of Creation just cited is a fairly advanced symbolic work of myth, according to Cassirer. The same kind of ordering is performed on less advanced levels. That myth is a discourse, and is indicative of a more developed mind than can be found in primitives who think of a tree or a pole as the center of the world giving it its order. More conscious creation occurs in the case of the Epic, and the symbolic product is less bound with immediate sensation (of an actual wooden pole). I am thinking of a myth and a symbol of the center of the world cited by Eliade: According to the traditions of an Arunta tribe, the Achilpa, in mythical times the divine being Numbakula cosmicized their future territory, created their Ancestor, and established their institutions. From the trunk of a gum tree, [the culture hero] Numbakula fashioned the sacred pole (kauwa-auwa) and, after anointing it with oil, climbed it and disappeared into the sky. This pole represents a cosmic axis, for it is around the sacred pole that territory becomes habitable, hence is transformed into a world. The sacred pole consequently plays an important role ritually. During their wanderings the Achilpa always carry it with them and choose the direction they are to take by the direction toward which it bends. This allows them, while being continually on the move, to be always in 'their world' and, at the same time, in communication with the sky into which Numbakula vanished. For the pole to be broken denotes catastrophe; it is like 'the end of the world', reversion to chaos (33).

78

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Once the pole did break and the modern observers reported that the Arunta "lay down on the ground together and waited for death to overtake them." Modern common sense would react, "How seriously primitives take their symbols!" The surprise shows that the center of the world for the primitives is not the same as those abstractly present in the assumptions about reality of the modern empirical worldview. The symbols in both cases are not merely arbitrary but are what make a world and a human identity. In both cases there is some awareness of the center of the world or the basic assumptions without a knowledge of the full processes behind them. Symbols of the center continue as cultures advance. Centuries before Christ the Israelites wandered from place to place setting up a temporary residence and ordering the nomadic camp according to the placement of tents containing a holy arc or box. The arc and the tents containing them resembled the pole, but more importantly the symbol of the center for the Israelites was more intellectualized (they had more of a story about it) and the control it had over their lives seems less because they were more aware that they gave the importance to the arc as a conscious act of faith. The wooden pole and its myth are both examples of symbols in Cassirer's view, and it is useful for illustrating principles of symbolism in general, which are present in myth in a very rudimentary form. Mythical symbols belong in complexes of symbols and ultimately become integrated into one comprehensive mythology.

THE CHANGE IN THE SYMBOLISM Primitive Language Language has a distinctive character in the mythical worldview unlike what it comes to mean in later cultures. It exhibits features of other mythical symbols. For instance, language is less general, less unified, less abstract; more emotive, closer to the needs of life and the practices of customs. In some cultures there are large numbers of words for every different actual bird or plant, though there is no word for the class of such birds or plants (PSF I, 290). Words are even regarded as containing the essence of the things they designate; the word for a god is sufficient to gain control over it or a word may be regarded as manifesting the demon (PSF II, 158). A word is an essence or a force, no less than a photograph is the essence of a person.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

79

In myth there is paronymy or linguistic ambivalence (PSF II, 21-22). In "The Technique of Our Modern Political Myths," Cassirer gives a modern example of Nazi propaganda involving the change of the language (See Heinz Paechter's Nazì-Deutsch. A Glossary of Contemporary German Usage, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1944). The Nazi's created two words with a very big difference in meaning but with a very small difference in spelling and pronunciation: Siegfriede and Siegerfriede (SMC 255). The first means a peace paradoxically achieved through the war waged by the unified Nazi campaign; the latter means a victory by the multiple allied forces. One is honourable; the other, detestable. What almost seems to be the same word and in ordinary cases would not be so different acquires extremely opposite emotive values. Some examples from ancient myth are the following. An example is "time" in early Greek thought since, for a while, the word for physical time was also the word for a god who ordered physical processes. Generally, when myth is considered from a modern viewpoint, there is ambivalence or contradiction. This is due to the concentration on expressive qualities rather than other more explicit kinds of relations which may be considered in terms of verification. A phenomenon similar to paronymy occurs in Plato's complaint about the "poets" who made gods change their minds, act in ungodly or human ways. The gods should act in a consistent way and a way befitting of gods. Another example, from another domain, could come from magic. Primitives do not question the possibility of magic if the results are negative, because the god may not have chosen to respond this time. The differing feelings are not compared for consistency by the mythical mind, and the reason is that the situations are regarded as different, as defined through different expressive qualities in each case. Development in Mythical Symbolism Cassirer argues that symbols are inherently progressive: they lead to more advanced ones (PSF I, 104). The process may be slow or fast in various cultures. The process starts by distinctions in things. Some things are sacred; some, profane. Cassirer believes the mind pursues the sacred symbols more than the profane, so that the symbols point the direction in which the primitive mind should take to advance itself. Eliade would agree that a direction of development is suggested in the value given to symbols; symbols of the center indicate what is most sacred (The Myth of the Eternal Return 12-17).

80

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The symbol is the possibility of development because its meaning contains a reference beyond itself. A symbol suggests associations with other things and can represent a complex of other symbols. Elucidating the meaning of symbols, working it out, relating them, this process creates a larger more articulate network of meaning just as it extends the meaning of the original symbols. The reference to a greater whole and to other contents means that a content can repeat relations of other contents so that the relating process of mind becomes present to itself in ever greater generality. Images, he claims, tend to weave together into myths. The images become more stable in the process of their being related and more complex images—images of images—develop (LM 36). There is a sense in which Cassirer reads primitives as proto-philosophers seeking to revise their worldviews and ascend to a higher level of knowledge—something like a gestalt shift in meaning, a revolution in science as advanced by Kuhn, or a Copernican revolution. To the extent that the symbolism leads to a reflection on the law of all its thinking, the primitive mind is described in terms of a philosopher seeking to revise his/her assumptions. It is true that Cassirer does not believe there is one point in time, one moment in history, during which a person, let alone a culture, suddenly rejects all former views and adopts an entirely new worldview. Nevertheless, Cassirer regards the shift as an entire shift in meaning of every concept, a process even in an individual occurring over time. The condition for the possibility of a revolution in worldviews is present in the nature of the symbol—its inclusion in its meaning of a complex of related symbols: "Thus in the spatial form which mythical thinking devises the whole mythical life form is imprinted and can, in a certain sense, be read from it" (PSF II, 99). An easier to understand situation is the level of a language: different expressions condition each other so that they are composed into a single system according to which the level of abstract thought can be gauged (Cassirer discusses this as a main theme in Volume I of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms). The Limit of Mythical Symbolism The final symbols of myth, occurring at different points in history, show the same epistemological deficiencies. The desire for a greater integration of experience is thwarted by the singularity of the image. Cassirer gives the example of the Egyptian pyramids: 'The tombs of the pyramids, become the mightiest symbol of this spiritual trend, which aims at the temporal eternity, the unlimited duration of the I and which can

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 1

81

achieve this aim only in architectural and plastic embodiment, only in the intuitive visibility of space. But one can only advance beyond this whole phase of intuition and representation when the ethical motif of the self becomes more sharply defined" (PSF II, 166-67). The idea that the Pharaohs would live forever is spatially understood in the symbol of a shape which points to the heavens, in particular certain stars, the future abodes of the god on earth for a time in the form of The Pharaoh, and which in itself has a kind of timelessness in its form—a perfection, definiteness, completeness. Appropriately enough, the pyramids prove to be perhaps the most endurable structures made by humanity and triangles among the strongest shapes used in reinforcing buildings, bridges, and other structures. Using other terms, Cassirer explains the same symbol as being the possibility of an idea for which there is no sensory equivalent: . . . all temporal dynamics is ultimately transformed into a kind of spatial statics. This transformation has found its clearest expression in Egyptian art, where this tendency toward stabilization is most magnificently and consistently represented—where all reality, all life, and all movement seem to be confined within rigid geometric forms. The negation of mere temporality . . . is here achieved by immersion in the purely intuitive, plastic, and architectonic form of things. In its clarity, concreteness, and eternity this form triumphs over all mere succession, over the ceaseless flux and transcience of all temporal configurations. The Egyptian pyramid is the visible sign of this triumph, hence the symbol of the fundamental aesthetic and religious intuition of Egyptian culture (PSF II, 128). In the early Greek philosophers, Cassirer continues, there is a gradual understanding that the permanent validity of a universal principle cannot be represented as a physical thing. In the following chapters there are more discussions of the limit of the mythical worldview, whether it be the limit determined by space, time, or some other conception. NOTES 1 See "Chapter 6: Toward a Pathology of the Symbolic Consciousness," PSF III. 2 EM 38-40. See Theoretical Biology, trans. Doris L. Mackinnon, N.Y., Harcourt Brace, 1926.

82

Cassirer and Langer on Myth The term "performative" when applied to the meaning of a literary text can be found in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edition, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971. De Man discusses the dynamics of the statement of a text and its performance, or what it says and what it does. Cassirer has a similar distinction when he discusses the difference between what the symbol is and does; this issue is discussed in this book in the section on the mythical law of thought and dialectic. 4 PSF IV, 70-71. Cassirer quotes lines from Johann Gottfried Herder, "Über den Ursprung der Sprache," Herders Sämmtliche Werke, Ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1891), Vol. 5, p. 53. 5 PSF III, 102. Cassirer takes the example from Werner, Einführung in die Entwicklungspsychologie, Section 43, and Cassirer refers to Stern, Die Psychologie der frühen Kindheit, 417 ff. 6 PSF III, 90. Cassirer takes the example from Jakob Spieth's book Die Religion der Ewer in Süd-Togo (Leipzig, 1911), 7 ff. 3

CHAPTER 4

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2 The Structure of Behavior: Space, Time, and Number "A philosophy of human culture does not ask the same question as a metaphysical or theological system. Here we are not inquiring into the subject matter but into the form of mythical imagination and religious thought. The subjects, the themes, and motives of mythical thought are unmeasurable. If we approach the mythical world from this side it always remains—to use Milton's words—'a dark illimitable oceanjwithout bound, without dimension, where length, breadth and height,/And Time and place are lost'" (EM 73). The first stage of the theory of myth is a definition of myth as a symbolic form, a worldview philosophically constructed with the help of interpreted data from the empirical social sciences. In the previous chapter the first criterion of a symbolic form—a unique symbolism—was discussed. The second criterion is that a cultural activity must have an "inner form" or "logic." (The third one, a developmental pattern or dialectic, will be discussed later.) The symbols of myth do vary somewhat in type and degree of development, but they all have in common a manner of production, which is the inner form. Without this unity it would be hard to explain how the symbols are related and form a single fabric of meaning or worldview. The philosophical task is to show the inner form through different ordering principles or schemata of the physical world called "categories." The ones to be discussed are space, time, number, cause, thing, and self. Cassirer will accomplish what he intends, he will show the unity of the inner form of myth, if he can show how the manner of production through these different categories is the same so that one world of myth is constructed.

83

84

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

THE STRUCTURE OF MYTH: ITS INNER FORM COMPRISED OF CATEGORIES As Cassirer points out in the first volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on language, he came to this idea partly because of previous research on an inner form of language, especially by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The wealth of research on different languages suggested some fundamental principles by which they could be compared. Since expressions indicated the limits of conceptions in all aspects of a culture, many things could be known about a people by inferring the conceptual activity as the common "form" in the expressions. It is generally known that comparative grammar preceded the rise of the different sciences studying myth. Cassirer's search for a form of myth follows the historical precedent. Inspired by these early linguistic efforts, Cassirer extended the notion of an inner form of a language to the idea of an inner form for any cultural activity. At the same time he construed it philosophically, as not a mere generalization of empirical data but as fulfilling the criteria of a universal and necessary system of knowledge. The idea of a form of myth, the definition of its worldview, is distinctly philosophical rather than empirically known through other sciences. The form is called "inner" because it is not outer, not perceivable by the senses as is the symbolism. Cassirer must read the pattern in the various products and actions: "The ideal form is known only by and in the aggregate of the sensible signs which it uses for its expression" (PSF I, 86). So the form means the manner of producing the symbols (PSF II, 54), of making them into a whole not just an aggregate (PSF II, 34). It is the "universal tendency" and "the direction of its content" (PSF II, 179). If Cassirer does explain myth as part of an ideal system of knowledge (past, present, and future), then he finds the form of myth which is more than a mere "sum" of its contents (PSF I, 94). How is the form or unity of myth more than a sum of its contents? It must be the condition of them and in this sense prior. Thus the particular [the thing in mythical experience] can be posited only on the basis of a universal schema which is merely filled with new concrete content as our experience of the 'thing' and its 'attributes' progresses. The point as a simple and particular position is possible only 'in' space, i.e., logically speaking, under presupposition of a system comprising all designations of position; the idea of the temporal

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

85

'now' can be defined only in relation to a sequence of moments and to the order of succession that we call 'time'—and the same is true of the relation between the thing and its properties. All these relations (the detailed definition and analysis of which are the business of specialized epistemology) disclose the same fundamental characteristic of consciousness, namely, that the whole is not obtained from its parts, but that every notion of a part already encompasses the notion of the whole, not as to content, but as to general structure and form. Every particular belongs from the outset to a definite complex and in itself expresses the rule of this complex. It is the totality of these rules which constitutes the true unity of consciousness, as a unity of time, space, objective synthesis [understanding a physical thing]" (PSF I, 102).

This passage is a claim for a philosophical unity of mythical phenomena which is logically prior to particular contents (a priori). Space is not an object but a way of relating objects and of having a total world in which objects are found (PSF III, 149). In the discussion on symbolism it was mentioned that anything known by humans is symbolic and this means it contains a reference to other things as part of its meaning. This necessary reference can be described by space, time, and other categories of understanding. Particular things can only have a meaning if they are made according to principles which make other ones suggested in their meaning. As an example from language in the nonphilosophical sense, an adjective cannot be understood unless it refers to a noun. We do understand adjectives by themselves, because some minimal sense of reference is contained in or suggested by the adjective. The reference depends on a knowledge of structure or grammar. Within particular contents we have an implicit sense of their structure or belonging to other contents. In a sense, when Cassirer tries to find the inner form of myth, he is trying to find its "deep structure or grammar." [Of course, linguistically speaking, grammar can only evolve through changes in particular contents so that the form is more integrated with its contents than a box with some object in it.] Since the form is logically prior to particular contents it is not the result of a conscious decision nor is it the result of a decision made by one person (PSF II, 192); the form of myth results from people forming a common world through group activity, such as in the theory of the origin of language in which short sentences eventually arise from the sounds made by groups of people while working at a common task. Cassirer's attempt to find an inner form—to prove a unity of myth—is

86

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

not the final goal of his philosophy. He tries to explain a unity of all knowledge, including the past, the present, and the future. A theory of myth will suggest to Cassirer some concepts that are in a sense more universal than myth in the totality of civilization. "We must follow an indirect way: we must analyze the forms of human culture in order to discover the true character of space and time in our human world" (EM 42). The phrase "our world" is ambiguous or perhaps polyvalent; it could mean the twentiethcentury world in which Cassirer lived when he wrote or it could mean the world which all humans, including primitives, share and which they will share in the future, or it could mean both. In any case the theory of myth is a means for the philosopher to achieve a synoptic view of human civilization in the true sense of a theory which would also pertain to the future. The interest in myth starts because he wants to build an ideal system of knowledge that would apply to the past, the present, and the future, and myth seems to provide the model of the first type of human knowing. From the very beginning, the idea of a symbolic form means the idea of one worldview among many different ones. To show this difference of myth he must show how its inner form differs in particular ways from that of other worldviews. The inner form is found and described through these actual specific differences. The principles explaining these differences are "categories." They are necessary for the unity of a worldview, and the philosopher considers them separately so as to find actual differences in worldviews even though in actual cultures they could not be separate (PSF I, 226). The categories are the means by which even primitives can form a "world concept." Empirical researches in myth describe and list actual world concepts, but they do not try to construct new ideas to explain the way it is made, as Cassirer does. The Categories Building the Mythical Worldview In nonphilosophical terms a category is any division in a field of knowledge; in biology a category would be a phylum used to classify each species of plants and animals. Perhaps thanks to philosophy, a category also means a classification of terms that is ultimate and not susceptible to further analysis. The idea of categories is one philosophers have used throughout history. Aristotle analyzed the forms of predication from which he postulated what must logically be the forms of existing things—for example, substance, quality, and quantity. In the eighteenth century Immanuel Kant developed categories as any of the fundamental principles of understanding by which phenomena of the physical world

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

87

are structured and ordered. Hegel revised Kant's categories by changing their relationships and making them members in a logical series of evolution (dialectical). Cassirer revises Hegel's idea of categories, mainly by saying there is not just one single line of development through categories defining any human knowledge, but there are historical changes in any category which limit it to a particular cultural form; space can be a category but it must be defined differently in myth, common sense, and science. The pattern of development in those cultural areas differs as shown by the categories. Cassirer paraphrases his idea of a "category" in many ways. I do not think this abundance of aspects in the definition is confusing, because one thing is always defined through other things and the more things that are considered the more the original definition is expanded or clarified. Some of these usages may prepare the way for a detailed discussion. (1) When Cassirer calls them "basic theoretical concepts of knowledge," he suggests describes them as scientific, explanatory in interest. (2) "Ideal relations" suggests that they are not the result of induction from particular cases (PSF III, 317). "Underlying" and "general structural principles" suggests that they are not the result of conscious choice and must be used (EM 69). "Intuitive schemata," which is used quite frequently, suggests that the categories order the world of things, of practical life, and in so doing they are "concrete expressions of wholeness" of an entire outlook on the world (PSF II, 79). They are "types of relation" and "modes of synthesis" (PSF II, 60); thus, they "make" the world in a specific way— not in any way imaginable but in a way with some degree of conformity and success in practical behavior, and this idea explains the possibility of different worlds—if each one is the result of a unique type of creative act. Categories are "conditions" of anything known (PSF III, 300) and are universal in human civilization (PSF II, 43). Categories may go beyond a specific historical period: they are "general structural patterns not restricted to a particular age" (EM 69). They can only be useful as ordering principles by the philosopher if they are fewer in number than the concepts being ordered, and Cassirer does believe that "the possible categories for each form are few and limited" (EM 69). The categories necessarily function together or "condition each other" (PSF II, 43). The categories help to explain progress, not only withinmyth but from myth to other types of cultural forms. In fact, the mythical thinker's categories help to bring about the progress: they are "instruments and stages in the process of objectivization" (PSF II, 82) and each one is a "medium of spiritualization" (PSF II, 143).

88

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The List of All Categories Cassirer chooses three categories to be the primary ones—"primary" in the sense that they are most important for the completion of a philosophy of symbolic forms. By far he discusses space, time, and number the most. These have something in common, for they "round out the world of intuition" (PSF I, 226); in other worlds, they are the most important ones for defining the world of everyday practical action, a world of physical things in which we orient ourselves. Also, it is important to notice that these three categories are discussed much more than other possible ones because they help Cassirer explain the differences between symbolic forms, between myth and other worldviews. Cassirer discusses the most number of categories when defining myth. One reason for this might be that he needs to prove that myth is just as much a worldview as is the common sense world of everyday affairs. The categories help him to define a symbolic form and to show its unity. If he cannot show the value of his idea of symbolic form in the case of myth, then it may not be a good enough principle to show the unity of other types of cultural formation, such as art or science. In addition, the categories of space, time, and number are more scientific than other ones, in the sense that by them we explain the physical world, and so by defining myth largely in terms of them he can show that myth belongs in a system of knowledge culminating in modern day science. Finally, there is a sense in which myth is a more complete worldview than the other symbolic forms are. Myth is a way of life, including all its activities, whereas other symbolic forms, such as art, are only partial activities within a whole actual culture. Besides space, time, and number, there are other categories by which the inner form of myth is defined, by which the unity of myth is shown as constituting a world. The chief ones are cause, thing, and the soul/I, which will be discussed. There are many other categories which Cassirer mentions in passing. The list is useful for conveying a sense of what a category is and how it is related to the more abstract idea of an inner form. Some other categories actually cited are the following: reality (PSF II, 61 and 246); the whole and the parts (PSF II, 50 and 67); similarity (PSF II, 67); attribute (Ibid.); substance (PSF II, 192, and EM 172); change (EM 172); nature (PSF I, 155); the sacred (PSF II, 74, note 1); property (PSF II, xv); and other categories which either may be suggested by some symbolic forms, such as symbolic forms of logic (PSF II, 172), economics, art, and tech-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

89

nology (PSF II, xv). He does think that there might be categories of some symbolic forms that are not common to other ones, as there might be of art (EM 69). Religion is said to have a category of "negation," which it uses in the greater intellectualization of mythical images (II, 245). Such an extension of his idea of category, however, would require that its original meaning be changed; it would no longer be a type of relation that is universal in all cultural activity though it would still be a type of synthesis that allows him to explain the unity of a single cultural activity. Cassirer speaks as if a few categories are more associated with some forms rather than with others. In the case of myth, he claims that space is more dominant than the other categories (PSF II, 99), and he discusses number very little in the context of myth but quite extensively in the context of science. The reason for this difference in the degree of influence of a category is that some of the categories require a higher level of mental development in order to be able to be known independently from other concepts. At first, spatial relations appear, only gradually do temporal relations become defined as distinct, and only later do numerical relations become knowable independently of the previous two kinds of relations. "Space," he claims, "forms as it were the universal medium in which spiritual productivity can first establish itself, in which it can produce its first structures and formations" (PSF III, 150). Cassirer shows the development of awareness from category to category even within myth by referring to a large number of empirical studies, as we shall see. MYTHICAL SPACE: THE SPACE OF FEELING AND OF THE HUMAN BODY The following discussion of space is ordered from the lowest levels of mythical awareness to the highest. As Cassirer does not concern himself with the exact ordering, and since the examples sometimes overlap, the order of topics here presented is not precisely the order of evolution in mythical thinking. A developmental order is easier to follow than one based on synchronic principles of mythical space. But more importantly, it will show that myth has an inner form, the unity of a worldview. To be a specific world view, it would have to have a beginning, a development, and an end. These structural points have occurred in history in different cultures, but Cassirer is not interested in pointing them out historically. His concern with the beginning, the development, and the end of a form of myth is ideal and structural (in the same way that ideas of science are): the same form has occurred at different times and places and has even

90

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

had variations in the degree of development or the particular symbols and customs. And the form may occur again—the theory leaves this open as a possibility. The "Space" of an Animal Environment Is Not the True Space of a Human World Many studies on myth have been negative or dismissive because they were always backward looking, seeing myth as a regression from the truth that has been realized. To be truly systematic and thorough, it must be admitted that myth was itself a stage in the evolution of life on earth. It must be possible to look at it not merely as the mistake of our past but as the success of some animals in leaving their mere animal origins behind and achieving a new category of biological existence: from inanimate to plant to animal and to human. Cassirer does explain how myth is a success. A discussion of the rise of myth from animal behavior is even more important for another reason. Some distinctive features of human knowledge are subtle and especially a type of knowledge that is far removed from our own, but if myth can be contrasted with a type of animal behavior and intelligence from which it developed, this contrast can make its distinctive success and some distinctive features of the new human type of existence clear. If there is a problem for us moderns to think back to a type of world we have left far behind, it seems even harder to think back to a state of an animal, which cannot really be said to think at all. "Thinking" may be a misnomer when applied to animals. Or is it? To be precise, what is the animal awareness of space, according to Cassirer? Pre-human "Space": The Organic and the Perceptual Based on the studies of biologists and animal psychologists, Cassirer describes the development from the organic space of single-celled and multicellular micro-organisms to the perceptual space of the higher primates and then to the symbolic space of the first mythical thinkers (PSF III, 148 ff.). Organic space means a domain of movement in which plants and microorganisms can move themselves only through stimuli that come in direct contact with them. Sunlight causes plants to grow in a certain direction, and flowers open or close with the coming of the night or the day. The Venus Fly Trap captures insects in response to their touch. Perhaps these actions can hardly be called movement in space. Single-celled organisms respond with internal changes to heat and cold and the feeling

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

91

of different substances and movement around them. Multicellular organisms orient themselves according to direct tactile stimuli. There is little or no control of the environment and any movement is perhaps just as much the result of the environment. A big step up in the biological awareness of space is the perceptual, in which the animal does not have to be in contact with an object in order to respond to it in space. On this level of awareness, the environment is not an immediate tactile datum or set of data but is a group of them. With a greater capacity to receive stimuli, such as the formation of the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, the stimuli reacted to correspondingly become more complex and varied. The control of the environment or the adaptation to it is more powerful. One could say, too, that the animal has become more of a distinct presence in the environment without ever being able to regard objects according to centers of attention and direction that are changeable according to a purpose at any time (III, 158). The spider is one of Cassirer's main examples (III, 152, note 9). Its environment is virtually no larger than the web it weaves, within which it cannot approach a fly if it stops moving in the web, sine the sensation of touch accounts for virtually all of the awareness of space. The Evolutionary Leap to Symbolical or Mythical Space Another big advance occurs when the protohumans began to behave symbolically in space. At first, this space was a space of action, as it had been, except that the new types of action became possible. Just as in perceptual space animals gain a new freedom from the environment and a new power to react to it, so too in symbolic space the first primitives became less confined to the available external stimuli and more able to act so as to change them. A common but good example is in tool use. Animals can in a sense use tools; a monkey can use a stick to knock down a banana, or move a chair to get one down.1 However, they only do this if the stick or the chair is in the immediate perceptual field with the banana. Some scholars do not think these actions constitute genuine tool usage because there is little or no variation in the use of the stick. Why not use it as a drum? A Weapon? Why not keep it and carry it around for another day? There is no general sense that I can make tools and maybe can use other objects. Since the stick must be very perceptually related to the banana, there is little retained sense of its purpose as a tool, or no sense, after the action has been performed. There does not seem to be a sense that the stick is both a stick (an uneatable brown thing) and not a stick but

92

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

a tool capable of being used. There is little or no sense of the possible and of a meaningful—not to mention enduring—connection between the stick and the banana. Another thing that could be said is that the use of the stick to knock down the banana is not an action that changes the general orientation of the monkey to the environment, that is to say, in other situations and at other times. One conclusion about this example is that the stick does not retain its meaning much or at all outside the immediate peceptual field. While the monkeys have that at least, space is smaller than human space, as it were, and is less united in the sense that the stick cannot be related to the banana by a space of possible action: why not take the stick and hit the branch with the banana? In conclusion, animals live in a space of an environment, but humans have extended and changed this space so that it is also a possible space of a much more integrated world. Things that are "not here," that I cannot see, smell, taste, or touch, or that have not been sensed just a few moments before and so are fresh sensations just wearing away, have little role in the behavior of animals. The new human capacity is to use some objects from the environment, like the stick, so as to get a sense of a world of possibility, in which behavior changes can be generalized and applied to result in a total change of the human to the world. From the stick, from found objects, primitives continue the treatment of physical things as objects with an alternative human use by creating their own tools, and then by creating artifacts. Cassirer defined human symbols as having the traits of universal applicability, variability, and meaningfulness as designation. If the stick is a tool in the human sense, it does not have to be used but it can merely be kept, perhaps for later use or no use at all, and still designated as—"considered to be"—a tool. An animal does not consider a stick to be a tool; either it picks up the stick or does not. Whatever attitude there is, is either felt during an action or remembered during the course of a new action. The humans can have the attitude without the need to act. This freedom of forming the world allows an entirely different kind of field of action and behavior in it. The change in behavior benefitting people is almost limitless; animals do not seem capable of so much change in behavior. In summary, the space of animals is a mere environment. This means it is only a domain to act in or not to act in. It excludes or does not suggest what is not here. The objects in an environment are less connected to each other and they are less permanent than they would be for humans. The space is hardly one of possibility but one of physical need, state, and response. On the other hand, human space is a world or

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

93

universe: it is indefinitely and infinitely larger, its parts are more related, and it is a space of possibility. It helps make possible a freedom from mere stimuli so that the attitude of people is not confined to the moment and can begin to change their behavior more and more. In the theory of myth, Cassirer tries to understand the type of first spatial awareness that is human. The Representation of Space through the Feeling of the Human Body The change from animal space to human space was at first a change in actions. The first spatial relations are formed by feeling them and representing them through the human body and its members (PSF I, 229). Although Cassirer writes very little about the very first moments of spatial awareness, surely they would have been isolated moments of awareness and space would have been more animal-like than it is for us—smaller, more confining of our behavioral responses, less of a domain of possibility. At this stage there would be no distinction between heaven and hell, no creation myths dividing the world. Instead, the human body would develop habits of movement and coordinate itself with respect to objects in a new way, with the consequence that objects could begin to be used as tools, or rudimentary clothing worn.2 Modest preparations might have been made for hunting or symbolic coordination of the position of different hunters to trap an animal. In any case, the first spatial awareness was manifest in actions and involved a changed behavior toward objects without any language to convey it. But Cassirer claims that when isolated acts of spatial awareness become constant patterns of orientation, then there can be said to be a "world-feeling" and the start of the mythical consciousness: Throughout its spatial orientation myth clings to the primary and primitive modes of mythical world-feeling. The spatial intuition that myth achieves does not conceal or destroy this world-feeling but is rather the decisive instrument for its expression. Myth arrives at spatial determinations and differentiations only by lending a peculiar mythical accent to each 'region' in space, to the 'here' and 'there', the rising and setting of the sun, the 'above' and 'below'. Space is now divided into definitive zones and directions, but each of these has not only a purely intuitive meaning but also an expressive character of its own (PSF III, 150).

94

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

At first distinctions are general and vague such as here and there, up and down, above and below, before and after, in which the human body defines the relative meaning of the two. If the body is high, than something may be below it, but if the body is low, the same object may be above it. Only if one is able to form an abstract schema independent of the body's position can one think of space in a more advanced way than the mythical. Mythical space is a space of action, bodily movement, not a theoretical space. Cassirer felt that this space was well described using modern language by Martin Heidegger: The place and the place-manifold may not be interpreted as the where of any random presence of things. The place is the determinate 'there' and 'here' where a thing belongs. .. . This regional orientation of the place-manifold of things at-hand [zuhanden] makes up the aroundness, the around-us, of what is in our closest environment. Never is a threedimensional manifold of possible positions filled with existing [vorhanden] things given to begin with. This dimensionality of space is still cloaked in the spatiality of the at-hand. . . . All 'wheres' are disclosed and exhibited round about us through the comings and goings of everyday life, not ascertained and specified by reflective spatial measurement (PSF III, 149, note 4).

Cassirer points out that Heidegger does not define space in any other way than this merely "pragmatic space," which happens to be the same as the space of myth, but that the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms defines other kinds which develop from this original type. Perhaps the most important phrase is that in pragmatic, mythical space there can never be thought a place which is "the where of any random presence of things," for this is an abstract concept of space, in which it is universal and independent in relation to an actual thing or position of the percipient's body. Even on a slightly higher level spatial distinctions still cannot be thought by themselves but only through other qualities, as in the case of the very primitive sense of space in the Cora Indians.3 Whatever spatial distinctions they have are related to the cosmic ones of day and night, light and darkness. The dawning of the light serves a similar function of instituting a world order with divisions in it, and this is the function of space to permit distinctions within an originally whole domain of orientation. The book of Genesis is the most obvious example, but in many other creation myths the light begins the division of the world into heaven and earth, east and west, and even here and there, and so on. The

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

95

modern mind thinks of genesis as happening only once, but the mythical person thinks each time is the time, the Genesis. The significance for the concept of space is that primitive space is looser, more momentary, less secure than the modern is. There are fewer symbols to allow the primitive to be able to continue to think it. When consciousness can feel major distinctions between light and dark in connection with other ones like east and west, above and below, and others, there is an experience of awe, of something sacred, as described well in Genesis, because it is "the first characteristic beginning of mythical thinking," it is the dawning of a worldview (PSF II, 97). Only gradually can the feeling of space become self-conscious or explicit. In general it is characteristic of myth on Cassirer's view to hypostatize relations, to be able to understand them only as existing substances. The Cora Indians hypostatize spatial directions into "gods of the east and north, of the west and south, of the lower and upper world" (PSF II, 98). On a higher level of awareness than the Cora Indians, the Egyptians in the Babylonian creation legend "explain" the order of the world, with its spatial divisions, as a victory of the god of the morning and the spring sun, Marduk, against the god of darkness, Tiamat (PSF II, 92). Qualitative distinctions develop hand in hand with spatial relations, so that neither can be abstracted from the other. The rise of the sun in the east leads to a sense of the direction as the source of life, and the opposite applies to the place where the sun sets, the place of darkness and decline, an association continuing even in the twentieth century in Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West He claims, " . . . every qualitative difference seems to have an aspect in which it is also spatial, while every spatial difference is and remains a qualitative difference. Between the two realms there occurs a kind of exchange, a perpetual transition from one to the other" (PSF I, 85). Cassirer emphasizes that human feelings and states of the body are projected outward during the formation of spatial relations. This process continues throughout the development of the mythical mind, and the spatial relations become more developed even though they may still use the imagery of the light and the dark, the upper and the lower worlds. Spatial Awareness in Totemism Totemism is significant for a discussion of mythical space because it is a very early type of thinking. All of human life and the cosmos, too, is ordered according to a totemic classification of some plant, some animal, and in later cultures the first human ancestors. In the Zunis, members of a

96

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

clan are related to each other and to zones of space according to the totemic organization (PSF II, 92). At death a member must be buried in a position proper to the clan. Space as a whole is divided into seven zones, north and south, east and west, the upper and the lower world, and finally the center of the world; and every reality occupies its unequivocal position, its definitely prescribed place, within this general classification. The elements of nature, the physical substances as well as the separate phases of the world process, are differentiated accordingly. To the north belongs the air, to the south fire, to the east earth, to the west water, the north is the home of winter, the south of summer, the east of autumn, the west of spring, etc. And the various human classes, occupations, and institutions enter into the same basic schema: war and warriors belong to the north, the hunt and the hunter to the west, medicine and agriculture to the south, magic and religion to the east. Strange and eccentric as these classifications may appear at first glance, it is certain that they did not arise by chance but are an expression of a very definite and typical outlook (PSF 86-87).

Cassirer points out that the ordering of the world is permanent enough that when the Zunis move to a new place, the position of the different clans and the order in the customs is pre-established (Ibid. 102). The important thing about this level of spatial awareness is that it is mixed with all the other distinctions of cultural life and space does not have an independent status. Concepts such as the explanation of the origin of a people are mixed with the divisions of the world by which practical activity is also determined (where the clans can be placed in a new camp, where the dead are buried). The Jorubs, like the Zunis, have a totemic organization for everything (PSF II, 87). When referring to them, Cassirer points out that all nonspatial distinctions develop through spatial representation: "the whole sacral system" is developed on the basis of "certain fundamental spatial differences, particularly the fundamental distinction between right and left." Space as an Imaginary Projection of the Bodily Feeling In Volume Two: Mythical Thought there are many examples to show how space can only be thought if it is represented through the human body. The level of ability to form abstractions is much lower than that of the

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

97

modern mind, but much higher than that of animals, which cannot represent the form of the space they act in. Essentially, the mythical representations of space give a sense to the primitives of the manner of their forming the space actually lived in. They live in a space whose dimension and directions are limited by the feeling of their actual bodies, and in their myths the cosmic spatial divisions are also determined by parts of a body, albeit a divine one. As one example a hymn of the Rigveda describes how the world issued from the body of man, the Purusha. The world is the Purusha, for it arose when the god offered him up as a sacrifice and brought forth the various creatures from the parts of this body, which was dismembered in accordance with the laws of sacrifice. Thus, the parts of the world are nothing other than the organs of the human body (PSF II, 90).

This myth presents a kind of cosmic map, but an actual map with abstract coordinates cannot be drawn by primitives. As Cassirer explains, an Indian can navigate a river in a canoe very well and repeat the journey on a subsequent day, but when asked to draw a map of the river, the request is not understood (EM 46). The Indian does not have a sufficiently abstract sense of space to be able to form a schema of it. What happens on the repeatable journey is that at one point the Indian remembers some landmark and the feeling attached to his situation at that place—either the extra muscular effort needed in the faster waters at that point, or the bad sight of some dead trees and plantlife by the shore, or maybe the place where a spirit of cool wind resides. It is only after that moment that the primitive can begin to recall where to go next. The entire route is a somewhat disjuncted but nonetheless recoverable sequence of remembered feelings. At higher levels of myth more and more of the journey can be remembered at one time, but in no case can it be retold, drawn, or understood without some reference to remembered feelings along the journey. The path cannot be stated as a co-ordinate system common to every traveler but is only understandable as one made by this traveler. This limit to the ability of the mythical mind to represent spatial relations can be more convincing if the development of maps and geography through the course of human civilization is compared. The making of maps was a skill that had to be achieved, even though journeys had been repeated for centuries before their existence. Maps themselves became more abstract, more universal, more numerical and depended less on physical qualities of objects at different places. Sometimes today when we are driving a car, when we do not know a place well yet, or when we do not have a

98

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

map, we do not know where to turn except at a difficult corner on top of a hill or an imposingly big, dark tree at the bottom. The mythical mind always bases its sense of space on physiognomic traits, felt qualities. An Indian could not read a map because the symbols are not physiognomic; he has as of yet no feelings at different points of the journey. Actual physical objects or cites are needed in spatial orientation. Symbols of the center of the world are examples. In the case of an Arunta tribe, the Achilpa, which was previously cited, the center could not be thought, nor all the divisions of where to put the tents, where to perform different daily activities, if there were no actual tree, no cosmic pole (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane 33). This example shows Cassirer's idea that space cannot be thought without being represented through an actual thing, in this case a tree trunk made into a pole. The Achilpa have endowed it with sacred status, and when combined with the myth about the tree, rituals, and memories there is a system of orientation, as a spider needs a web to function properly. Modern people do not need a physical thing to remember how to orient themselves in a "familiar" place because their sense of space is more universal, more precise, and they construct it more; it is more symbolic. Such things as the symbol for the center of the world are the primitive's "abstract" analogue of his/her own body in space. The manner of forming space is mirrored in the representation of it. In later types of worldview, the means of orientation is not an actual object but a system of coordinates. Of course, there are many advantages if one has the ability to orient himself/herself by the latter means. One can go to places one has never been to and find particular points with the help of only the map; cites can more precisely be determined in relation to others; the map of the place is more permanent and transferable than the memories of a person; there is less chance of error if something is changed along the way, for if a wooded area is needed to orient oneself but it burns down, the next trip may cause confusion or error until a new record of experience is established. A partially analogous case occurred during the Nazi invasion of Poland when the Nazis upon entering a city were surprised to find that they could not use their maps, for all the street signs had been changed to slow down the invasion. But the Nazis knew that maps do not exist only on paper, or they need not depend only on the physical street signs, and so they forced some natives to show them the way based on a remembered schema or map of the city: they used a living map.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

99

The Progressive Development of Spatial Relations through Their Increasing Use Although spatial relations are always thought in combination with other qualities which are felt, they may be developed very much, from a mere space of physical actions for survival to the late mythical systems of astrology and then astronomy. In Astrology, the idea of the spatial positions of the planets is understood at the same time as conveying a message of the future from the planet to a person. Spatial relations have a feeling value, a personality, which is in the person born under a planet's sign. A thing gains its personality by its position, just as a position is a sign of a personality. The ancient Greeks thought that the elements had their proper places: air, earth, fire, and water belonged in certain places with respect to each other, as well as the hot and the cold, the wet and the dry. Conversely, the places were known by the qualities of the elements found there. Air is a place for light things like birds but people are not light like birds, and that is why they cannot belong in that place orfly.The identity of a thing's nature and a place allows the primitive to think spatially either from the thing to the place, or from the place to the thing. The Transference of Spatial Relations to Nonspatial Matters By developing spatial relations the mythical mind increasingly becomes able to transfer the type of relations into nonspatial matters, so that they help in the general development of the mythical mind. Cassirer gives an example from Roman theology: From the veneration of the temple threshold, which spatially separates the house of the god from the profane world, the fundamental juridicalreligious concept of property seems to have developed along similar lines in totally different cultural spheres. Just as it originally protected the house of the god, the sanctity of the threshold (in the form of land markings) safeguarded house andfieldsagainst hostile trespass and attack. Often the terms coined by language for the expression of religious awe and veneration go back to a basic sensuous-spatial idea, the idea of shrinking back from a particular spatial zone. And this spatial symbolism is transferred to the intuition and expression of circumstances of life bearing only the most indirect relation, if any, to space. Wherever mythical thinking and mythical feeling endow a content with particular value, wherever they distinguish it from others and lend

100

Cassirer and Langer on Myth it a special significance, this qualitative distinction tends to be represented in the image of spatial separation (PSF II, 103).

From the spatial-religious idea of the temple's threshold, the Roman's inferred a threshold to a family's house, which should then protect what was inside, and so the idea of private property becomes customary. One question is whether the sense of space causes the advance or whether since it is mixed with other qualities, like the sacred, some other quality causes the new idea of property. It is important to note that Cassirer says that the spatial relations were "transfered" but he does not explain this; he says, in a few lines above the claim for transfer, that the concepts seem "to have developed along similar lines." The development may only be parallel. Perhaps the development of the spatial relationship occurs at the same time as another development without being the cause of it, in the manner of Jungian synchronicity. Such developments could occur without a causal relation between two different aspects of experience because the mind forms a unity of all of them. In this case, nevertheless, the development of a spatial relation (the threshold of a house) and a sense of property (the protection of what is inside) occur together to signal the general advancement of the mythical mind. Nevertheless, I think Cassirer is right to suggest that a development in spatial awareness can advance the thinking in a related area. Certainly he gives much evidence in the case of temporal relations developing through spatial ones, which is the next topic of discussion. Logical schematism has come from the spatial (PSF III, 35). Even today, many of our expressions for logical distinctions derive from spatial imagery and for the primitive, too, spatial relations made a worldview possible. Cassirer points out that the word "contemplation" has its roots in "a ternplum, a sacred precinct in which he differentiates various zones" (PSF III, 151). With the division of the world into zones, and some representation of its unity, there is established a reference system for the development of more advanced types of concepts than space. MYTHICAL TIME: THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF MOMENTS OF FEELING Space is not enough for a worldview; the spatial images must be related to each other in a process of change or a sequence of bodily moevements. At the start of mythical consciousness, time is more difficult to think of than space is and so " . .. the expression of temporal relations develops

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

101

only through that of spatial relations" (PSF II, 106). Separating time from space is an abstraction useful for the discussion of mental development; of course, there is never a spatial experience which is not also a temporal one, but the mythical mind is more able to represent the awareness of space and on this basis to represent the awareness of time. A sense of space requires memory and a synthesis of different points, just as time requires memory and a synthesis of different moments. In the case of time, however, the primitive must reflect more on the activity of the mind, a change in its state, and relate these changes. Even this low level of self-awareness is more difficult to achieve than the direct perception of objects. Cassirer cites examples to show that the concept of time emerges through and from that of space. One of them is the following: "The Latin tempus . . . grew out of the idea and designation of the templum," "templum" meaning bisection and intersection, especially of the heavens into quarters, "passed into the time of day (e.g. morning) and thence into time in general."4 From Animal "Time" to Mythical Time The success and distinctive character of mythical time can more clearly be shown if its development upon animal time is discussed. Also, it will help to present the character of time, as of space, to be an agent of progress, moving the mythical mind to more universal and determinate ideas. "Time" is a misnomer when applied to animal behavior. An animal is captive within a sequence of actions, and so this type of synthesis shows how small the animal environment is in comparison to the human world. "It cannot," writes Cassirer, "depart from that chain of actions, or interrupt the sequence by representing its factors singly. Nor is an anticipation of the future in an image or ideal plan possible or requisite for the animal. Only in man does a new form of action arise, which is rooted in a new form of temporal vision" (PSF III, 183). For the human, the "not now" plays a much more important role in the "now." This requires a sense of possibility lacking in the animal and an ability to represent some relations in physical symbols so that they may be related in ever greater complex senses of time, delineating a greater scope of time and eventually a sense of history. The condition for the sense of possibiity and means of using symbols is the ability to consider every moment in a temporal sequence as "determined by reference to the whole." Cassirer calls this process the power of "looking before and after"; in other words,

102

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

these spatial terms signify the ability of the mythical mind to consider what happened a moment ago and what might happen in the future. This sense of possibility opens the door for the consideration of alternative actions and for reflection on the way the human is acting which the animal is not capable of. Certainly, animals can remember some events and act in the present accordingly, even if we were to suppose that they could not make longrange or elaborate plans (EM 50-51). It is most accurate to speak of the animal memory as repetition, record, or preservation of actual impressions. Mythical, Symbolic Time In contrast Cassirer claims the first human minds do not merely repeat the past events and so respond in the same way; rather, each memory is creative, synthetic, and constructive (Ibid.). New ideas can occur during memory partially due to the ordering process (III, 179). They order a sequence of moments so that they can be retained and can be recalled as this created order and a change has already occurred. Cassirer calls this sequence "configurations of particular content" and "temporal gestalts" (PSF II, 107). Different people at a traffic accident remember it in different ways, with usually slight variations. Also, the temporal gestalts divide the temporal flow of experience into boundaries so that its phases can be compared and changes in responses could occur. Humans consider an actual impression in the present, know that it has become past, and anticipate that they might encounter something similar. The humans know that the impression occupies different stages of time and they have the freedom to consider it as having moved and as applicable to a future situation. There is more scope for finding ways to realize one's desires. There is a greater awareness of the connection between the stages of time and a greater control over behavior, especially to change the reaction to the impression should it be encountered again. The humans can construct the temporal relation they are using, while the animals can only act within a sequence without knowing its form and without knowing that the relation between subject and impression is partially defined by this form, which changes and can be changed at will. The primitive can dwell on the past more than the animal can, which cannot really dwell on it—it re-feels it in the same way. There is an even greater difference concerning the sense of the future. The primitive has a much more definite sense of the future. Eventually, from a hypothetical sense of the future in tool usage the

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

103

mythical mind will rise to ethical notions and ideals which may have no practical realization. The original tendencies to regard time hypothetically and define its stages increase until advanced and abstract means of measuring time are developed in worldviews beyond myth. A Vague Sense of the Rhythms of Life and General Changes At first the sense of time is a feeling of changes in the body and sensations of external changes. This "biological time" precedes the indifferent time of the clock in post-mythical thinking. The primitive, at first, only has a "sensitivity to the peculiar periodicity and rhythm of human life" (PSF II, 108). Some of the most general changes are those of light and darkness, day and night, and less easy to keep in the mind, the changes in the seasons, the phases of the moon. The distinctions disappear as soon as they are felt because there are no created symbols apart from the percepts to retain the mental state in a record (as writing is a record of experience). Without the creation of symbols such as gestures or language or drawings or rituals, these natural changes can only be remembered and represented because of their connection with personal states of feeling. So they seem to be powers, willful acts, because they cannot be separated from personal feelings. The sense of time is apprehended only by feeling general natural changes and "only by projecting these phenomena into human existence, where it perceives them as in a mirror" (PSF II, 109). In Cassirer's view, time can be sensed through this mutual determination of natural changes and changes in states of a subject. The awareness of the temporal relations of the subjective states requires the outward expression of change in the natural phenomena, just as those natural phenomena are only understandable as bound to momentary states of feeling. The Cult Makes Temporal Distinctions More Specific, Definite, and Enduring After the temporal awareness of day and night, the seasons, the phases of the moon, sleeping and waking life, primitives can develop an increased awareness of subjective time on a larger scale than daily activities. Cults of time developed from the worship of light. "In the Persian religion," reports Cassirer, "the cult of time and the segments of time, of the centuries, the years, the four seasons, the twelve months, and particular days and hours, developed from the general worship of light" (PSF II, 108). This origin of the sense of time shows Cassirer's general principle that

104

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

primitives can only be aware of time through physical processes and states of feeling (109). In rites of passage and initiation rites cults make the transitions of life, whether of age or status, into temporal distinctions (PSF II, 109). Without the rites, the transitions are changes of another qualitative time besides time, but with the rites the temporal relations become enduring, since they are repeated in exactly the same way and periodically. These rites are on a higher level of symbolism than the feeling for day and night and cosmic changes, because those symbols were natural phenomena with less synthesis and creation than in the case of rites. More symbolizing has to occur when rites are performed. Cassirer's Use of the Primordial or Absolute Past With the development of cults and their customs, temporal distinctions expand further into the past to a primordial time, when the cosmos (human and divine) began. This is not an historical date in the mind of the primitives; there is no year assigned to the event—such an ability is post-mythical. Nor are the number of years between the original event and the present day expressed or even knowable. The primordial time is a way of explaining the new customs, which themselves were mixed with new temporal distinctions. In this way the sense of time leads to new and more complex distinctions. Customs are worshipped when they are related to the original event of the primordial past; that is, they acquire some sacred quality merely because they are thought to be related to something sacred (PSF II, 105). The sacred means something out of the ordinary or special. In this advance, the improving sense of time leads the way: " . . . a rigid barrier divides the empirical present from the mythical origin and gives to each its own inalienable 'character' " (PSF II, 106). At the same time that the customs are sanctified, they are explained, claims Cassirer (Ibid.). The relating of an event to the primordial past is a mode of explanation, a mode of causation we would say today. No difference exists between what the modern mind would call a religious interest and a scientific one. It might be best to say that the primitive has neither—only the interest in forming new symbols by which to make his/her world more definite and enduring. The introduction of a new temporal awareness, that of the primordial past, brings with it new and mixed awareness of human actions and even physical objects, plants, and animals in the environment. A type of mythical tale explains the origin of plants and animals (PSF II, 105, note

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

105

2). The derivation of customs has been mentioned, and there is the derivation of the identity of a people from original ancestors in the primordial past. (Not until much later does the more advanced notion of an apocalypse, an end, develop.) Although a modern person would ask the primitive to explain the primordial past, the primitive does not think it needs to have an explanation or a cause (PSF II, 106). In the mythical world there is no perpetual duration and no sense that any temporal moment must have one before it and one after it. The contemporary scientific idea of a Big Bang starting the universe seems to the layman to posit a Primordial Past. In several passages, Cassirer does mention the similarity in the tendency of both myth and science for their symbolisms to create wholistic conceptions of experience. The analogy, certainly, is only a loose one because the sense of time linking the Big Bang to the present day world is very different in character from that linking the mythical present with a Primordial Past. The Primitive's Experience Is Rather Confined to the Present and Comparatively Fragmented Language can indicate much about the thinking of a people, and Cassirer uses large amounts of data. In some languages there are no linguistic distinctions for the earliest past and the latest future, and there may be only one adverb for both yesterday and tomorrow (PSF I, 220-21). Time is fragmented and reified. Temporal relations are represented with nouns having spatial meaning (I, 221). The sense of time is only one of these nouns so that a more complex awareness of time, such as expressed in future perfect verbs, is not possible. Separate phases of action cannot be represented by an abstract schema; the primitive must be engaged in the sequence, though the phases can be remembered and then performed during their sequence (PSF III, 276). The reification of time can be further seen in the inability to distinguish time from the qualties of things; time therefore is not a quantity as it is in modern life (II, 188). Temporal relations are distinguished by felt changes in the body and these are only perceivable at first through the spatial. Tradition, the Cosmos, and the Temporal Ordering of the Present Way of Life through Festivals and Rites The rites associated with the Primordial Past increase in number and become more elaborate, thus developing into a sense of tradition. At first,

106

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

the rites becoming institutionalized into a tradition do not distinguish between the human community and the cosmos; so nature can be aided because humans participate in it. Candles are lit, flowers hung, and dances performed at the Maypole rites to help nature renew itself and produce many crops. At many other festivals the participation of people in the working of the cosmos is necessary: Cassirer mentions Christmas, Easter, the summer solstice, and others. In terms used by Eliade in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the primitives must "regenerate" time and the cosmos or they think it will not continue (55-8). New Year's Festivals are parallel to fertitlity rites in this regenerative function. The other most important type of rite, which has the same function in general, is "the purification through the scapegoat." As symbols do, the festivals mediate between the cycle of human life and that of the cosmos. The festivals make the sense of time more definite and enduring and more active in the ordering of other events in life than had been the case before their development. The festivals regenerate the cosmos but more important for a study of the mythical mind they regenerate its sense of time and keep it active, for without the symbolism the sense would not be present. From Cyclical Time to an Emerging Sense of Eternity Through the repetition of festivals, especially those regenerating the cosmos and celebrating the seasons, an increasing sense of the repetition of the events, of a cycle, is felt. As Segal points out in his discussion of Campbell, the mythical notion of time as a cycle is opposed to our modern notion of time as progressive (55). Cyclic time is a more developed, more abstract idea for mythical thought, though in comparison to modern notions it is still very much realized through personal feeling and bodily processes. The mythical mind becomes less momentary and feels its permanence more, a fact showing the increasing strength of the unity of its worldview. "Instead of living in the present," Cassirer explains, "as an isolated point—or in a series of such points, a simple sequence of separate phases of action—it turns more and more to the contemplation of the eternal cycle of events" (PSF III, 111). This "recurring measure" is felt in all things. From a Sense of an Eternal Cycle to an Eternal Course of Events (Law) Cassirer explains how the sense of an eternal cycle, ever repeating, becomes the sense of the way events go in the universe, a prototypical no-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

107

tion of destiny or later law. In the Vedas, the concept of the Rita is celebrated, that is, the way things go, the course of the universe (PSF II, 116). This course of events is more general than the sense of time that must be regenerated and will eventually replace the need to do so for the newly found unity will include its recurrence year after year. The Rita shows the role of time in leading to more general notions in nontemporal matters, for it is "apprehended equally from the standpoint of reality and duty—a cosmic order which is at the same time an order of justice" (Ibid.). In the Vedas Cassirer sees an emerging, though yet unclear, conflict between a supratemporal power of destiny and creation, which always involves a single act in time. The sense of a common course for reality and duty is the foundation for a mythical ethical attitude sometimes called "universism." This belief requires that primitives have ethical duties to spirits in nature and if a primitive violates a taboo, the course of things—we would say nature— will punish the native. If someone does something contrary to the course of the universe, there will be some punishment. I can give an example from Ronald Cohen, a political anthropologist, who in a lecture related the following personal example. He had been doing a field study in an Eskimo tribe when one day he and an Indian were crossing a lake in a canoe. Knowing the destination, Cohen was surprised to see the Indian changing course somewhat abruptly. Cohen noticed another canoe on the lake with one man in it, but it was not in danger of crashing into his. When the guide of Cohen was asked why he had changed course, he replied that the Indian in the other canoe had violated a taboo of not sharing with fellow tribe members and "something bad was going to happen to him." The Indian did not mean that he or other members were going to punish the offender but that the violator of the course of events would undergo some accident or become sick. So, Cohen's guide did not want to be near, just in case the bad event happened when the two canoes were close together. It is perhaps an admirable notion that we think something is immoral not because a human convention has decreed it and we might be punished by someone else but because it is harmful whether anyone finds out or nor. The idea of punishment by someone else is a much later notion than punishment by the cosmos. The emergence of a sense of universal law from the course of events can be seen in the Babylonian creation myth. Thus the movements of the planets as the visible image of time expressed the new unity of meaning in which mythical-religious thinking

108

Cassirer and Langer on Myth was beginning to encompass the whole of reality and change. The creation myth of the Babylonians represents the rise of the world order from the formless primal source in the image of the struggle waged by the sun god Marduk against the monster Tiamat. After his victory Marduk established the planets as the seats of the great gods and determined their course; he introduced the signs of the zodiac, the year, and the twelve months; he set upfirmbarriers lest any of the days deviate or lose its way Thus, all movement and with it all life began when the luminousfigureof time penetrated absolutely formless being, differentiating it and breaking it up into separate phases. And since, for mythical thought and feeling, outward and inward events are closely intertwined, this regularity of the comsos implied an inviolable rule and norm appointed over the actions of men (PSF II, 115).

In this passage Cassirer makes clear how the developing sense of an eternal cycle leads to an even more general concept insofar as it has less direct connection with the various natural changes: "an inviolable rule and norm appointed over the actions of men." As the mythical mind reaches its most advanced phases, the relevance of time for furthering concepts of morality and law becomes clear. Cassirer believes in Homer's writings the relation of Zeus to Moira is an advance upon the emerging sense of a universal norm in the Babylonian Creation myth (PSF II, 116). Zeus is still a god, a universal power, but also a personality. To some extent, Moira, as an impersonal force over the gods and men, has power over even Zeus. In another passage Cassirer emphasizes the temporal significance of Moira from another standpoint. The concept represents the emerging awareness that the order of the changing world cannot itself be a part of it (PSF IV, 100). Nevertheless, Moira is still mythical, not merely because it is a subjective force instead of a logical principle but because the ordering principle of temporal change is understood in a single principle rather than in a complex system of concepts. This hypostatization of a complex of relations into a single individual of the complex is a characteristic of mythical thought in Cassirer's theory (pars pro toto). I might add that the controlling destiny emerges only in contrast to a sense of time, and it forms the basis for the notion of an eternal law which could only emerge later. Through the persona of Zeus, the ancient Greeks could begin to be aware of the conflict of personal desire and moral laws which might run counter to them. To Cassirer, the ancient Greeks represent a fairly high level of mythical thinking. He praises them for the new sense of freedom he finds in

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

109

their idea of time: "We might say that here for the first time thought and feeling become free to gain a pure and full cosnciousness of the temporal present" (PSF II, 133). The Limit of Mythical Time: An All-encompassing Law That Is Still Half-personal, Half-impersonal Cassirer believes that in Homer's writing time is still mythical, however advanced it is. In the sixth-century Greek philosopher Pherecydes of Syros time is even more impersonal than it was in Homer's writings and, although it still acts to create the physical world, its name has been changed from the personal Kronos to the impersonal Chronos, the modern Greek word for time (PSF II, 129). When expressions form for an impersonal time on the one hand, and an impersonal moral or natural eternal law on the other hand, then the mythical mind has advanced to the religious. In myths of the Avesta people, separate gods become distinguished for the natural and the ethical orders. With the creation and designation of these spiritual powers . . . we have attained to a sphere of religious idea which is more than a mere mythical image-world, which is indeed shot through with truly dialectical and speculattive motifs. And once again these motifs are most clearly developed in the determination of the concept of time. It is here that the tension between the idea of eternity and the idea of creation becomes strongest—so that it gradually seems to transform the whole religious system from within and give it a new character. The Avesta distinguishes two basic forms of time: limitless time, or eternity, and the 'prevailing time of the long period', which Ahura Mazda has appointed as the time for the history of the world . . . (PSF II, 117).

The boundary between myth and religion—insofar as it is definable through the concept of time—is made clearer by Cassirer when he cites the rudimentary religion of Zruvanism: "Endless Time splits in two, thus creating the power of Good and Evil, his twin sons who belong to each other but must forever combat each other" (PSF II, 117). This example still uses anthropomorphic imagery characteristic of myth, and in many passages Cassirer seems to allow the use of mythical symbols by religion but with a new more ideal, eventually allegorical significance. Just as in the case of space, time is never conceived fully apart from the qualities of the things engaged in the temporal process. The qualities

110

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

of some things may be transferred by association with time to other things. Cassirer cites the fact that the moon's phases often determined important dates (II, 108). The moon's efficacy was transfered through its temporal phases to an idea of the best time to engage in battles (waged during the day). Caesar said Ariovistus delayed a battle until the new moon, as did the Lacedaemonians. Similarly, the moon is thought to control time in many cultures and to dictate the most auspicious times for actions. With the end of the mythical way of thinking, time is no longer a god or a substance but it becomes a relation. Nevertheless, in any culture people may have postmythical ideas in some activities of their lives while retaining mythical ideas in other, perhaps more personal activities. As a hypothetical illustration, accountants who can use in their work ideas not available to the primitive mind might nevertheless believe in time travel, that currently popular idea of science fiction, which assumes the subsistence of the past and the existence of the future and their unity with the present. Another example is Astrology. Some professionals in their private lives may place much importance on their horoscopes to suggest behavior to them. In areas where strong emotions may be involved, such as in romance, the modern mind may be more susceptible to mythical thinking. In myth, however, no such options of behaving rationally at work but somewhat mythically in aspects of private life are available. MYTHICAL NUMBER—CANNOT BE DISTINGUISHED FROM QUALITIES OF THINGS After space and time, Cassirer considers number to be "the third great formal motif dominating the structure of the mythical world" (PSF II, 140). He considers it one of the three essential categories for the unity of a worldview in which people move and act and for comparison of myth with other worldviews. In the main volume on myth, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. II: Mythical Thought, number is discussed after space and time because only through their expression does the mythical mind come to distinguish numerical concepts, as we shall see in the following section. In the context of myth Cassirer discusses number less than those other main categories. In the third volume, which is primarily on science, number is discussed there quite extensively because it is a type of symbolism most proper to the scientific attitude, just as the image tends to be identified by Cassirer with the mythical mind and the word and sentence with the common sense mind.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

111

In the case of number, Cassirer's discussions show that, from culture to culture, this concept develops in a greater variety of ways and rates than do space and time. This fact may show that its development is at first

led by that of space and of time. Nevertheless, he successfully shows the role of number in building the unity of a mythical worldview. Though number evolves through the symbolisms of space and time, which are closer to physical things, eventually it serves to articulate those relations with greater clarity, in a process of mutual development—number and the other symbolisms. Animal Intelligence and the Sense of Number It is harder to make a case for the animal awareness of numbers than it is for the awareness of space and time. Cassirer does not discuss the issue as he does for those less abstract categories. It would be harder to observe empirically the use of numbers than the use of some kind of spatial or temporal relations. Numbers require a greater symbolic substratum for their use; they seem to have less of a direct reference to things than space and time do, and as a consequence the symbols resemble objects less. There is one passage in which Cassirer may discuss animal intelligence and numbers (EM 31, note 12): the story of the horse named Clever Hans, which reportedly could do complicated problems such as extracting cube roots. The owner would verbally set his horse a mathematical problem [the horse could not read] and Clever Hans would stamp out the answer with his foot. Psychologists and other scientists tried to find out how this was possible. After many tests, they finally discovered that Clever Hans could only do the problems in the presence of its owner. Whenever a problem was set, the owner would make some involuntary movements which the horse could sense and know when to stop stamping its foot. Animals are known to be sensitive to their owners' feelings, and it is well known that dogs cannot understand the denotation of words but can respond to the tone of the voice and learn a small number of fixed, conditioned responses. In the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer explains that even simple additions and subtractions require a symbolic capability, which is denied to the animal: Essentially, to find the sum 7 and 5, or the difference between them, means nothing more than to count five steps forward from 7 or five steps backward. Thus the decisive factor is that the number 7, although

112

Cassirer and Langer on Myth retaining ist position in the original series, is taken in a new meaning, as the starting point of a new series where it assumes the role of zero. Every number in the original series can thus be made into the starting point of a new series. Now the beginning is no longer an absolute beginning, but a relative one: it is not given but must be posited in each case according to the conditions of the problem (PSF III, 250).

This level of ability is also denied to the first primitives, yet the passage serves to raise the question, how do they begin the first acts of counting physical objects? When There Were No Words for Numbers But Something Like Counting Was Possible The first type of counting, Cassirer conveys on the basis of the ethnological data, could only occur if the objects were in contact with the body and in a specific way. For this reason he gives them the oxymoronic term "manual concept," or "purely mimetic concepts," or "body concepts," that is, concepts only known by the body, by representation through a bodily part or action (PSF III, 229). At first the means of symbolizing number is so weak that it can only be represented with the help of the muscles: The Ewe, for example, count on their outstretched fingers; beginning with the little finger of the left hand and turning back the counted finger with the pointer of their right hand: after the left hand, they do the same with the right hand, then they either begin again from the beginning or squat on the ground and continue counting on their toes.

Another example is reading with one's lips. Such a limitation in thought calls to mind the rigid sequence of actions necessary when animals become behaviorally conditioned, as did Pavlov's dogs. While in the scientific achievements of centuries later number helps to give precision and universality to space and time (PSF III, 342), in the beginnings of a human world number had to be presented in spatial and temporal relations. A next step up in the ability to count is not to have to feel each new number as a finger or a toe but to feel it through a gesture (PSF I, 230). At this stage there are still no words for counting, though there are words for the specific motions of the arms.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

113

The Klamath language has a variety of 'numerals' formed from verbs of setting, laying, placing, each indicating a particular type of arrangement, according to the specific character of the objects to be counted. One class of objects must be spread on the ground to be counted, another must be piled in layers, another arranged in rows—and to each specific arrangement of the objects corresponds a different 'numeral classifier' (PSF I, 230).

Even though it seems that counting is done at a distance, the objects must still be moved with the body or else there is no counting. On the first levels of myth there is no counting of objects at a distance. A shepherd would not be able to count his sheep just by looking at them. Fortunately, just by looking the shepherd does know if one is missing, even if the flock is large. In the optical imagination the primitive can make general distinctions as to shape and size, and certainly color (PSF I, 233). Also, some other very individual physiognomic traits may help to compensate for the undeveloped enumerating function. The missing sheep may have been the youngest, or the loudest, or some other quality could serve to make an identifiable impression. Sometimes the quality which allows for some kind of numerical awareness is shape or size, and this trend seems to run throughout the mythical worldview, in increasing abstractions, to the point of the emergence of geometrical concepts. Cassirer cites the example of the cross, one of the oldest symbols and the most lasting, through which a sense of the number four is felt (PSF II, 147). Based as it is on ethnographical data, this example of Cassirer's is interesting, though not a good one, for this particular principle because the modern mind tends to think of the number three when thinking of the Christian cross (not the four-pronged precursor from ancient Greece of the Nazi swastika). There are many other examples. The most famous is the pyramid of dots by which Pythagoras understood the number ten and raised it to a religious principle. The inability to conceive numbers apart from shapes is a good example of the general mythical practice of hypostatization, the making of an immaterial relation or conception into a material thing. Today we think a number is a nonmaterial relation or an intellectual operation, which may or may not be applied to material things, though their truth is decided without them. In passing Cassirer mentions the possibility of a feeling for the number of different phases in life. The post-mythical idea of the Trinity or a Triune God, he claims, has very archaic origins in the triad of family

114

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

relationship (father, mother, and child) (PSF II, 151). Perhaps even further back, according to some mythologists, the idea of the sacred threeness seems traceable to some "biological feeling" of a very early time (PSF II, 145). (Some scientists and semioticists [George Beadle and G. Prodi] believe the feeling has a basis in the structure of DNA, but this is speculation and in any case goes beyond the scope of Cassirer's theory of myth.) Another case is the etymology of the dual and the triad. In some languages the expressions for them were originally and sometimes concurrently the words for I, you, and he (PSF II, 150). Words for Numbers as Qualities Shared with Different Objects Once the mythical mind can form different words for numbers, and can count things without moving them at the same time, still the sense of number is not separable from the things being counted, but it shares in other nonnumerical qualities. "In the language of the Fiji Islands, for example, different words are used to designate groups of two, ten, a hundred, a thousand coconuts, or a group often canoes, ten fish, etc." (PSF I, 233). Part of the inability to think of a number as separate is the inability of language at this level of mind to form relations of physical things that are sufficiently abstract (Ibid.). In many ways, mythical language is unable to provide some symbolism for relations general enough to conceive of numbers separately. In its initial phases language is concerned with establishing more or less stable identities of things, just as children learn nouns before verbs. As just one other example used by Cassirer, in cases where there are distinct words for numbers, these may be distinguished grammatically, which shows that there are qualitative difference in numbers that keep them mixed with the things being counted. Different numbers are different parts of speech in the following languages and perhaps others: the Semitic, ur-Indo-Germanic, the Indo-Iranian, Baltic-Slavic, and ancient Greek languages (PSF I, 243). The Emerging Use of Number as a Sacred Principle of Ordering the Cosmos As has been stated in previous sections, Cassirer argues that spatial and temporal relations precede and make possible the development of the more symbolic and abstract numerical ones. But through this process number begins to emerge as a sacred entity or power with some degree of

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 2

115

independence from space and time. At first the division of the cosmos into regions is a spatial one made through natural objects, phenomena, and later myths to explain their divisions, as in the case of the sacred pole of the Arunta, previously discussed (Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, 32 ff.). Temporal relations help to expand and articulate this cosmic order by marking out phases in the process and creating the idea of a primordial past. It is only after these achievements that, on Cassirer's view, number emerges as a principle which can help to order the cosmos. The sanctification of number occurs through existing spatial and temporal distinctions, which, however, number serves to articulate further. As far as space is concerned, not only are the various zones and directions as such imbued in the mythical view, with very definite religious accents, but such an accent adheres also to the totality of these directions, to the whole to which they are conceived to belong. Where north, south, east, and west are distinguished as the cardinal points of the world, this specific distinction usually serves as a model and prototype for all articulation of the world and the world process. Four now becomes the sacred number par excellence, for in it is expressed precisely this relation between every particular reality and the fundamental form of the universe. Anything which shows an actual four-fold organization—whether as an immediately known 'reality' imposing itself upon sensory observation, or whether conditioned in a purely ideal way by a specific mode of mythical apperception—seems attached, as though by inner magical ties, to certain parts os space (PSF II, 147).

As another example, Cassirer cites the Zunis, in whose worldview the number seven became mixed in the existing spatial division of the cosmos so as to form a "septuarchy which determines their sole theoretical and practiacl, intellectual and sociological view of the world" (PSF I, 148). Once sanctified by its relation to pre-existing cosmic relations, number retains the trait of being sacred and has this meaning in other contexts. Through this process number gains an even greater independent status for itself. Sacred Number as Having Its Own Properties and Powers After number has been sanctified because of its role in the spatial and temporal divisions of the cosmic order, it retains these traits and more

116

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

and more is defined as an independent sacred power. Cassirer cites Philolaus, Fragment 11, in which number is "supernatural and divine existence"; 'it is ruler and teacher of all things; it is God, One ever-existing, stable, unmoving, itself like to itself, different from the rest' " (PSF II, 145). This quote shows the power of number to be a more precise kind of symbolism than space and time. When number begins to be represented more by itself as is the case here, its greater universality is realized. It is Cassirer's general conclusion about symbolism that the product reveals the process of its formation: symbolism is a mirror of the mind. The Limit of Mythical Number The mythical mind can never surpass the act of making number into a physical thing, or sacred power, or something with the characteristics of a physical thing (PSF III, 283). Numbers have qualities which are transferable. Today, some people still believe in lucky numbers. And these numbers cause people to think about some things in a particular way simply because those things have that number. For example, many hotels do not list a thirteenth floor in the elevator or in the sequence of room numbers. Is it really missing? Can there be unlucky numbers in the sense that anything numbered thirteen would be bad? The possession and transference of these nonnumerical qualities by number are mythical, on Cassirer's view. Though space, time, and number are the primary categories for the sake of Cassirer's purposes, he believes others are necessary for understanding the idea of myth as a worldview, a symbolic form. In the following chapter the categories of cause, thing, and soul/I will be discussed. NOTES 1 My discussion is based on that of Langer's (PNK 135). She acquires the information from a number of writings on apes, children, and also children who were found in the wild to have been raised by animals. 2 Cassirer discusses space in this way—as afieldof movement for the human body with new symbolic potentialities—in EM 46. 3 In PSF II, 96, Cassirer draws these conclusions from the studies by Preuss in Die Nayarit-Expedition, I, xxiii ff. 4 In PSF II, 107, Cassirer quotes Usener, Götternamen, p. 192.

CHAPTER 5

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3 The Structure of Behavior: Cause, Thing, and Soul/I "Thus in its most original, truly primitive configurations myth knows as little of a 'soul'substance as of a 'thing'substance in the metaphysical sense of the words. Reality— corporeal or psychic—has not yet become stabilized but preserves a peculiar 'fluidity'. Reality is not yet divided into definite classes of things with characteristics established once and for all; nor have any hard and fast dividing lines been drawn between the various spheres of life. Just as there are no permanent substrates for the world of outward perception, so there are no enduring subjects for the world of inner perception. For here, too, the fundamental motif of myth—the motif of 'metamorphosis'—prevails" (PSF III, 71). THE CATEGORIES OF CAUSE, THING, AND SOUL/I When Cassirer presents his book-length definition of myth as a symbolic form, he defines it in terms of more categories than he does in the cases of other cultural forms. This fact highlights the importance of myth in his philosophy, since he would discuss it in more detail, and it shows that for him myth is uniquely a complete human world, with its own type of perception, action, and "explanations" of reality in the form mainly of mythical tales. Besides space, time, and number, which are the main principles of unity and comparison for Cassirer, there are the categories of cause, thing, and soul/I. More like the three main categories, cause is discussed at greater length than are "thing" and "soul/I." He discusses cause in many passages in the mode of other symbolic forms, and so it is a good category to compare myth with other ones. To some extent, "thing" is also discussed as a means of comparison. The least discussed 117

118

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

when he compares myth to other symbolic forms is "soul/I." I suggest that this is the case because after the development of a sense of an individual self-consciousness through myth, this category is less valuable for explaining the characteristic formative activity of other symbolic forms such as science. The self is less revealing for a scientific theory than it is for a mythical tale about the origin of a people. Just as space, time, and number were seen to be intertwined in their development, so too cause, thing, and soul/I "condition" one another (PSF II, 43). It is Cassirer's view that the categories of a worldview work together to make the unity of a single perspective. In contrast to other disciplines, only philosophy attempts to give a definition of and an explanation for the unity of a worldview. He discusses the mythical thing in the chapter "The Mythical Consciousness of the Object." There, he uses the word object, though in the volumes on other symbolic forms he tends to use the word "thing" more, because myth does not yet have a sense of a thing with attributes that the modern empirical mind takes for granted. Prior to this type of object, the main individual identity for things in the world were physiognomic traits, powers, and spirits—a dreamlike perception with more of a sense of the state of the body. In Mythical Thought Cassirer does not have a separate chapter on cause, though he discusses it extensively when he discusses magic, creation myths, and cultural myths explaining the origin of customs or of a people. With the concept of cause, Cassirer begins to explain the workings of the mind more than the processes of ordering the physical world. MYTHICAL CAUSE: THE HYPOSTASIS OF THE FEELING OF ANY RELATION Difficulties and Doubts Concerning a Theory of Mythical Causation Does myth actually have a sense of cause? Isn't this a scientific idea, which is not really representative of the intentions of primitives? Isn't the type of "cause" in myth so strange or so invalid as to require a different term if we do compare it to modern explanation? How does the primitive act in ordinary life if the strange causes are the only types thinkable? These are some of the main difficulties and doubts raised by scholars and addressed by Cassirer. Cassirer's answer is quite clear: "Mythical thinking is by no means lacking in the universal category of cause and effect, which is in a sense

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

119

one of its very fundamentals" (PSF II, 43). The meaning of mythical cause, however, is a difficult matter of interpretation. The level of thinking is not yet high enough to have a pure "disinterested" scientific interest. Consequently, he seems to claim that myth does not think causally: "Because myth lacks the form of causal analysis," but he immediately defines the form to be the scientific one (PSF II, 51). What then are the intentions of the primitives? What do they think they are doing? One Cassirean scholar, Donald Philip Verene, does not think Cassirer's idea of cause applies to ordinary, daily practical activity, though it does explain the extraordinary rites, festivals, magic, and myths, and so on. Although Cassirer's theory of myth has definite advantages it is not without difficulties. Considered as an account of primitive mentality Cassirer's theory of myth appears not to give an adequate description of the kind of thinking the primitive employs in his daily life and crafts. Malinowski argues, in Magic, Science and Religion, that every primitive community 'is in possession of a considerable store of knowledge, based on experience and fashioned by reason'. He maintains that in practical activities and crafts such as agriculture and shipbuilding the primitive employs rules that are rationally organized and empirically based. The primitive is well aware, Malinowski claims, of the effects on crops of weather, soil conditions, and pests and in building canoes of the importance of proper materials, principles of stability, and hydrodynamics. The primitive craftsman is capable—not only of entertaining the principles of these activities in his own mind but of exlaining them to his assistants. Side by side with this body of empirical knowledge yet distinguished from it the primitive has a body of magical rites and myth ("Cassirer's View of Myth and Symbol," 561-62).

(It must be remembered that the data here presented is from a tribe after contact with modern civilization.) Verene does not think this problem casts doubt on the entire theory of myth but only on "how widely we are to interpret it as a description of primitive mentality." Verene offers the defence that there may be a difference in degree between the type of practical cause used in myth and that of science; in other words, primitives use two types of causes and the more practical one is less scientific than the more common type today. Besides the mere difference in degree, there may be a subtle difference in kind that Cassirer only suggests but does not make a case to present. Surely, the successful causal thinking in primitive

120

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

daily life is of a different type than the one of the modern empirical common sense thinker of today. The materials used were those found; the causes imputed were those that were part of the immediate situation; there were no extended sequences of causal reasoning—in fact no intermediary reason, as we shall see; there was no attempt at separate experimentation to verify the causal relation but rather if there were a failure in making a canoe the process simple started again; the scope of practical activity was very small in proportion to what it is today, a fact suggesting diminished ability and a type of interest different from present-day causal reasoning. If Verene is right that there are two types of causes, or that Cassirer's idea of cause does not apply to practical activity, then I think that the objection could be serious, for the symbolic form may not have unity, or at the least the concept of a category used to prove the unity is inadequate. Part of the situation can be explained by the history of studies on myth. At the start of the twentieth century many studies regarded myth negatively, as a mistake, disease, or a stage that was unfortunately passed through. The emphasis, naturally, was to explain the mythical phenomena that were most strange to the modern empirical mind—magic, sacrifice, and so on. Cassirer does write about these topics more when discussing cause, though he tries to do so in a positive way. Furthermore, he does discuss cause in the context of practical activities, albeit very little, just for the sake of comparison to higher mental forms in which physical causes are more scientific. But this statement of mitigating circumstances does not really answer Verene's and others' objections. One type of answer could be that in an actual culture Cassirer's idea of primitive cause is mixed with another more scientific type in its early stages. Cassirer does speak about the mixture or co-existence of different symbolic forms after the early phase of civilization. Today, art, myth, religion, and science co-exist in one actual culture. Cassirer seems to claim that this is also the case in myth: Primitive man by no means lacks the ability to grasp the empirical difference of things. But in his conception of nature and life all these differences are obliterated by a stronger feeling: the deep conviction of a fundamental and indelible solidarity of life that bridges over the multiplicity and variety of its single forms (EM 82).

As attractive as this solution seems, it is inadequate because in Cassirer's theory myth is a complete and self-contained worldview. This is not true of any other symbolic form, though each has a unique perspective. Cas-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

121

sirer has failed to explain the unity of primitive myth if there is not one "inner form," or one "inner logic" to comprehend all of its mental acts. There is no halfway solution. A more satisfying answer given Cassirer's theory of myth would be to explain the idea of cause used in successful practical activities and to see if it is the same as the one used in extraordinary activities, which is not a very successful type of cause. Cassirer does not seem to provide hisreaders with a full answer because the discussion is not rhetorically organized to do so. He can answer the difficulties—there is a single sense of cause for both ordinary and extraordinary activities, both successful and unsuccessful inferences—as we shall see. The practical and the magical are not separable by the primitive mind (II, 182). A magical hunt precedes a "real" hunt, and the magical is just as important or more so than the actions later. On behalf of Cassirer I suggest that the ritual before the physical chase, which may last days, is just as important, though not in the terms understood by the primitives, that is, not literally, the ritual is the only way to conceive the upcoming events as a whole: the unity is one of feeling, of community action; the hunt cannot be planned by an abstract schema but is instead understood through bits of practical knowledge fused into a unity by feeling in ritual. Eventually, the rituals give way to myths and later, beyond the mythical consciousness, to historical reports of actual hunts and then plans of new ones. It is important to note that the distinction between the practical activities and the extraordinary ones is not known to the primitive and this way of speaking about cause suggests that the modern mind is distorting the analysis with anachronistic conceptions. A deeper understanding of the workings of the mythical mind when it uses causes will provide the solution. Verene's objection may lead some people to believe that the primitive does use only sound successful causal thinking in everyday matters, not weird, nearly incomprehensible thinking. Cassirer gives the example of an Indian who puts an ointment on an arrow after he has been wounded (PSF II, 52-53). The action only makes sense when it is recognized that the primitive feels a connection between the arrow and the painful wound, and this connection is hypostatized into a substantial identity of the two: a demon or enemy in both. If this is the case, then treating the arrow helps heal the wound or relieve the pain. In light of Cassirer's theory of the other symbolic forms, the mythical idea of causation in this example can be clarifed by contrast in the following way. The average empirical mind of today would regard the

122

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

arrow as separate from the wound and the wound would be a modification of the state of the body, not a new substance or force. In this case the wound would be treated. Beyond the average common sense a doctor, with scientific training, would understand series of changes occuring in the body so that the wound would not be a simple modification of the body but would be known as the series of changes throughout the body, both present and forthcoming or merely possible, which might suggest possible alternative remedies. This example is neither on the lowest nor the highest levels of mythical causal thinking. To show Cassirer's argument for the unity of myth, the following section presents the evolution of causal thinking and the similarities in all the stages. Cause Is an Idea Prior to Individual Contents Although the primitive mind hypostatizes the relation of cause and effect into a new thing, this mistake only serves to show how the relation is not of the same order as the things related. The relation is more general, more inclusive, and it goes into the definition of individual things as causes or effects. When Cassirer describes an aspect of the difference between cause in magic and cause in the empirical worldview, it becomes apparent that a causal relation is one that connects particular contents and that mythical and postmythical experience do this in different ways (PSF II, 53). The Beginnings of Causal Thinking In the cases of space, time, and number, the discussions always begin with animal intelligence. Cassirer does not discuss this matter as such, though an answer is implicit in the discussions of the learned responses of animals, the "conditioned reflexes" and "behavioral conditioning" in Pavlov's experiments. Animals can be taught to open doors, push buttons, go through mazes, and actually perform a sequence of otherwise meaningless steps in order to get food. Into this behavior the human mind would read a kind of cause. One example of animal "cause" given by Cassirer is the following: The psychobiologist, Dr. Pfungst, who had developed some new and interesting methods for the study of animal behavior, once told me that he had received a letter from a major about a curious problem. The major had a dog which accompanied him on his walks. Whenever the master got ready to go out the animal showed signs of great joy and ex-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

123

citement. But one day the major decided to try a little experiment. Pretending to go out, he put on his hat, took his cane, and made the customary preparations—without, however, any intention of going for a walk. To his great surprise the dog was not in the least deceived, he remained quietly in his corner. After a brief period of observation Dr. Pfungst was able to solve the mystery. In the major's room there was a desk with a drawer which contained some valuable and important documents. The major had formed the habit of rattling this drawer before leaving the house in order to make sure that it was safely locked. He did not do so the day he did not intend to go out. But for the dog this had become a signal, a necessary element of the walk-situation. Without this signal the dog did not react (EM 32-33, note 13).

With this example Cassirer shows the dog's inability to use symbols. The dog was unable to use one of the other actions besides the rattling of the drawer as representative of the total complex of actions of walking out the door and going on a walk. On Cassirer's view humans can represent a whole complex in a single content, and humans can choose which of many available contents can do this, though the dog had no freedom to choose how many were needed or which one (PSF II, 46). The dog would be able to re-learn to go to the door for a walk without the rattling of the door, but this fact shows that the dog is confined to a sequence of actions whereas the first primitives gained a new kind of control over them. A chicken can ring a bell, peck a lever, and walk through a door to get food, but if the lever is removed the chicken is confused and would need to be retrained. Not only is it the prerogative of humans to represent freely the complex in a single content, they more and more learn to make this content. A human could make a lever if it were missing. This face is evident in the development of tools. At first they were merely natural objects requiring no physical construction but yet which had the significance of a content being re-conceived so as to represent a total complex of actions. This same power of representation was developed until it allowed them to begin changing the objects, to sharpen sticks into spears, and later to tie sharp stones to sticks, and then to melt bronze to make metal spears. In this way a new sense of mythical causation is successful and represents an advance over the animal kingdom. The Local, Impressionistic, and Nonanalytical Sense of Cause For the primitive any cause is local in the sense that the chain of relations cannot be extremely long nor defined precisely (a cause is the feeling of

124

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

an association with something proximate). This ability seems to rise to the long explanations of Astrology yet there can be little precision in the connection between a planet and whether this is a lucky day or not, for the phenomena should be related to different classes of phenomena, not to each other. Similarly, a sickness is a demon (PSF II, 58); the mythical mind cannot think of it as a process involving many phases and occuring under specific conditions. Also, the cause is impressionistic in the sense that no test of the truth for the causal relation is ever considered; the relation is an immediate truth of the association of two objects. Primitive causal thinking is also nonanalytical in the sense that the total situation of the cause and effect is vague, undefined, not analyzed into conditions, nor is it considered that the cause may not be part of the same situation as the effect, belonging as they often do in magic and voodoo to different classes of objects. For example, the primitive does not try to create a control group as modern medical researchers do when they try to isolate the cause of food poisoning in a school cafeteria by determining which students ate which food. If they can find some food that all the sick students ate but which the healthy students did not, then they have used the idea of a control group to differentiate the total situation. It would be fair to say that the success of myth is for the modern mind also its failure. Another way to say it is that mythical causality is a stage, with limited value, that leads to better thinking. While the primitive can freely represent a total complex of actions in a single content and the animal cannot, still this representational ability is limited by modern standards. Cassirer's philosophical thinking about this matter is clear when he discusses Lévy-Bruhl's idea of polysynthesis, meaning that "for the mythical imagination there is no separation of a total complex into its elements, but that only a single undivided totality is represented—a totality in which there has been no 'dissociation' of separate factors" (PSF II, 46). Cassirer cites the worship of the heavens as a totality by the Cora Indians. It is Cassirer's view that primitives are unable to use an analyzed, differentiated totality in causal thinking. This fact results from his idea of the form of mythical thinking. He explains it in contrast to that of science which can combine and even create very different elements into the totality of a causal situation. The mythical mind cannot yet do this because it is still struggling to think of separate elements and to create the first symbols. Any object when it is near another begins to share a nature with it and a causal relation can be hypostatized without a real act of an infer-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

125

enee which would state why this thing and not that must be the cause. The mythical cause is not mediate, specific, and determined but immediate, general, and not determined by analysis of the situation. This is evident in the fact that mythical causation is today thought of as logically fallacious. Mythical Causal Inferences as Logical Fallacies Although the modern mind thinks post hoc, ergo propter hoc and juxta hoc, ergo propter hoc are logical fallacies, they are common, unquestioned conclusions in the mythical worldview. Myth does not try to verify its conceptions, because it does not yet have the means of dividing the true from the false (PSF III, 67). Post hoc, ergo propter hoc means that just because one thing comes after another the first thing is the cause of the second. The most common example is The swallow brings the spring'. In contemporary life an equally common saying is, The swallow does not bring the spring'. The second type of inference means that if one thing is related to another then it is the cause of it. This can be expressed negatively, guilt by association, and somewhat positively, when people want to rub elbows with important people. It is not hard to criticize mythical thinking; this is not the point. For Cassirer, the importance of these limits on mythical thinking is to help show the form common to all the different causal judgments. "Here every simultaneity," he writes, "every spatial coexistence and contact, provide a real causal 'sequence' (PSF II, 45). If there are two things in the same material whole, an immediate causal relationship can arise, almost as if by itself (PSF II, 51). By "a material whole" Cassirer means the type of unanalyzed and (for the mythical mind) unanalyzable connections among things. An identity of essence is immediately felt; no reason is given, need be given, and when asked to give one the question could not be understood. An example is vengance. If a member of a family killed a member of another family the trait of evil is shared by the whole family and so it is quite proper to seek revenge. The material whole is a family. Here it is evident that the mythical mind cannot think of one thing apart from the totality to which it belongs. The problem at the same time shows the success of myth (having some idea of a ontent representing a whole to which it belongs). Another example is the thought that if a man and a woman are alone any place together, of course something sexual will occur; so the woman must be chaperoned until the night of the wedding. The total situation is sexual— a trait materially shared by the two individual constituents in it. As

126

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Cassirer wrote about mythical cause in general, sometimes " . . . the whole is not so much the sum of its parts as a construct of their mutual relation; it signifies the unity of the dynamic conception in which each one participates and which it helps to accomplish" (PSF II, 51 ). At a level on which symbolic objects are just beginning to be thought, they cannot be internally complex or analyzable into parts. They are more simple essences, impressions, forces. At different times they may have different essences, but the thinking tends to be able to use only one at a time to relate it to others. In the example of the man and woman alone together, the mythical mind cannot think of the woman as sexual, and as a baker, and as a dancer, and as a neighbor, and so on, all at once in this situation. The mythical mind would be very sure that something sexual would happen because unconsciously an essence of the woman would be thought of that easily merged indistinguishably into the essence of the man or the situation. The limit of validity is expressed by Cassirer in these terms: Myth lacks any means of extending the moment beyond itself, of looking ahead of it or behind i t . . . it [mythical consciousness] possesses neither the impulsion nor the means to correct or criticize what is given here and now, to limit its objectivity by measuring it against something not given, something past or future. And if this mediate criterion is absent, all 'truth' and reality dissolve into the mere presence of the content, all phenomena are situated on a single plane (PSF II, 36).

This passage leads us back to the original questions about the presence of causal thinking in myth. For the modern mind, a causal relationship is something that needs to be or at least could be verified; for the primitive, there is no desire, possibility, or even understanding of what it means to verify the inference because it is more of an impression, an immediately felt response to an association that the mythical mind does not yet know it created. The nature of individual things must become more empirical and more stable and complex in form before the more abstract matter of their causal relations can be considered in the sense of some verifiable inference. When There Were No Individual Causes, Only a General Sense of Efficacy Cassirer always traces the first mythical thinking to the dawn of symbolism and the perception of physiognomic traits. Although Cassirer does

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

127

not argue this, it follows from this view that the sense of cause might go back this far but any further back and it would not yet be a human notion. In a way, physiognomic traits represent a sense of cause, for if the sky is blackening with the approach of a storm and a primitive becomes frightened, the threatening impression of the sky is a proto-cause, something that has an effect on the primitive. In a discussion of the earliest levels of causal thinking, Cassirer notes that the Hupa Indians think pain is a substance (PSF II, 55-56). This substance would be a cause. Not very different from this is the function of mana as a general efficacious force. Before there were causes, there was an undifferentiated feeling of efficacy. Cassirer writes, The conceptions of primitive religion are much more vague and indeterminate than our own conceptions and ideals. The mana of the Polynesians, like the corresponding conceptions that we find in other parts of the world, shows this vague and fluctuating character. It has no individuality, either subjective or objective. It is conceived as a common mysterious stuff that permeates all things. According to Codrington, who was the first to describe the concept of mana, it is 'a power or influence, not physical, and in a way super-natural; but it shows itself in physical force, or in any kind of power or excellence which a man possesses' (EM 96).

As the passage continues, Cassirer comments on how mana may be thought to be in a stone, giving it magical force. Objects possessed by magicians can be transferred to other people and the power goes with it, as in the case of the Ewes (PSF II, 57). Actually, the power which is mana is not "transferred" since it is wholly in the stone and a general power throughout the cosmos. The level of the language of the modern mind sometimes makes it hard to express thinking using language of a much less developed form. Cause is almost a contagion, as if it were a disease. The spontaneous feeling of a causal relationship is evident in mythical metamorphoses. They were the subject of many explanations by mythologists: how could someone think that a woman could be changed into a deer? So, the thinking must be allegorical. Preceding the causal myths of more advanced thinking, there were many metamorphoses in mythology. One thing became another thing. The mere fact that two people were associated could cause the mythical imagination to leap to the feeling of an identity of essence and a transference of the property or a causal relationship. It is common today for people to remark that pets resemble their owners. The

128

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

topic of metamorphoses suggests that the causal relation is merely an hypostasis of the feeling of relation. Cassirer explains the specific mythical ability on the basis of the general form of myth. Generally, he claims, myth "clings to the total representation," and it cannot isolate separate factors in it, such as specific conditions, nor can it keep the individual content different from the totality to which it belongs (PSF II, 47). Metamorphosis is not just something weird or bad. Corresponding to it is the symbolic attitude that people can make things act differently from the way they presently do—a stick can become a club or farm tool, a tribe member becomes the hunted animal in a ritual, a dancer becomes the god, a boy becomes a man. Also, through the observation of external metamorphoses, eventually the mind recognizes its own ability to change. The observation of many metamorphoses leads to the inference of individual causes and magic. Magical Causes: Mistaken Science? Pagan Religion? New Feeling of One's Own Powers? Most studies on magic try to show how it went wrong. Others try to show how a primitive could think of something so stupid. Cassirer tries to see it as a limited success. On Cassirer's view magic is a higher symbolism than is totemism, and its causal relations are more advanced. In the identification with the totemic clan the individual attempted to act out its desires and realize them less (EM 92). In this respect magic is successful—not for bringing the rain, or whatever the apparent goal might be—successful for making the mind more active in relation to its world; for concentrating on the relations between things in which some change is desired, whereas previously the beginning and the end points of the causal relation are not explicit; successful for presenting to the mind as in a mirror its new capacity to coordinate its body for ever greater symbolic tasks; for being the sign of a greater sense of individual will, which is still not an entirely spiritual thing if it can directly change physical objects without an adequate intermediary. In tribes using magic there is a sense of greater control over nature than in earlier ones where there is mana and taboo but as yet not many magic practices. Magic is important for what might be called general psychological or spiritual reasons. In it there is a new attention focused on individual desires of the will and how to realize them. Despite the failures in practi-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

129

cal empirical terms, the gain is in establishing a new attitude to nature, essentially one dividing those spheres more than they had been before: In the first stages of the magical world view scarcely any tension is felt to exist between the simple desire and the object toward which it is directed. Here an immediate power inheres in the wish itself, a power which suffices to intensify its expression in the extreme in order to release an efficacy which of itself leads to the attainment of the desired goal. All magic is permeated with this belief in the practical power of human wishes, this faith in the 'omnipotence of thought'. And this belief constantly gains new nourishment from man's experience in the field of action that is closest to him: in the influence he exerts on his own body, on the movements of his limbs (PSF II, 212).

Ironically, one of the successful enduring contributions of magic to culture is to have developed the "tension" "between the simple desire and the object toward which it is directed" so that eventually humans would begin to look for a physical means to realize their desires for physical changes. Various examples of primitive magic are well known. Cassirer summarizes them all by saying that the actions presuppose a substantial identity of a whole and parts (PSF II, 51). In other passages he points out the necessary transmission of properties from thing to thing (emanism, in II, 58). Some uneaten food left by a person can be poisoned so as to make the food still in the person's body itself poisoned. The spit of an enemy can be baked in a potato so that his/her strength will go away as in the drying and disappearance of the spit (52). In this example the strength is a nonmaterial property wholly present in the spit and can be harmed by a physical means. The life-force of someone can be wholly in a photograph, an article of clothing, a piece of hair, a tool. In An Essay on Man written approximately twenty years after Mythical Thought Cassirer pinpoints the role of magic as promoting the unity of the worldview or allowing primitives to feel it; it gave them the "sympathy of the Whole": We must approach the problem [of explaining magic] from the side of magic ritual. Malinowski has given a very impressive description of tribal festivities of the natives of the Trobriand Islands. They are always accompanied by mythical tales and magical ceremonies. During the sacred season, the season of harvest rejoicing, the younger

130

Cassirer and Langer on Myth generation are reminded by their elders that the spirits of their ancestors are about to return from the underworld. The spirits come for a few weeks and settle again in the villages, perched in the trees, sitting on high platforms specially erected for them, watching the magical dances. Such a magical rite give us a clear and concrete impression of the true sense of 'sympathetic magic', and of its social and religious function. The men who celebrate such a festivity, who perform their magical dances, are fused with each other and fused with all things in nature. They are not isolated; their joy is felt by the whole of nature and shared by their ancestors. Space and time have vanished; the past has become the present; the golden age has come back (EM 95).

Cassirer states the overall function of magic as a "social and religious function," but this conclusion is immediately made from this type of example and not other ones, such as rain magic or fertility rites. In those examples, too, this conclusion holds if we understand it to pertain not just to the human community but to the unity of the world. Through magic the primitive comes to recognize its activity when forming its worldview; its will becomes presented as one pole of a causal relation. Scapegoat Rites and Rituals of Atonement Actions such as these seem not to have what we would call a scientific, but a religious significance. Eventually, rituals of atonement develop beyond the level of the magical control over enemies and nature by regarding the rituals as causing a spiritual rather than a merely physical change. Cassirer explains his view, And even purely 'spiritual', purel 'moral' attributes are in this sense regarded as transferable substances, as is shown by a number of ritual rules regulating this transference. Thus a taint, a miasma that a community has brought on itself, can be transferred to an individual, a slave for example, and destroyed by the sacrifice of the slave. The Greek Thargelia and certain Ionian festivals included a similar ritual of atonement going back to the most ancient mythical origins. Originally these rites of purification and atonement were based not on a symbolic substitution but on a real, physical transference (PSF II, 56).

On this level of causal thinking a sin can be physically transferred, a fact paralleling the direct relation of the will to things in magical curses, summonings, spells.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

131

Causal Myths about the Origins of Natural Objects, Customs, Society, and the Cosmos A step up in the level of thinking occurs when mythical tales explain the origin or cause of physical things, customs, social organization, and the cosmos. The tales, with increasingly more details, state the cause for a complex group of symbols, for example, for songs, melodies, and the methods of sacrifices. They are said to derive from a primordial origin,; from the material body of Purusha. this is a typical conception, as is shown by the analogy with a Vedic hymn of creation which describes how the living creatures, the beasts of the air and wilderness, the sun, the moon, and the air issued from the parts of the Purusha, the man who was offered up as a sacrifice by the gods. And here the characteristic hypostatization essential to all mythical thinking stands out even more sharply; for it is not only concrete, perceptible objects whose genesis is explained in this way but highly complex, mediated formal relations. The songs and melodies, the meters and sacrificial formulas also issued from different parts of the Purusha; and the social orders disclose the same concrete, material origin (PSF II, 54).

The castes which defined the entire social organization also were caused by Purusha. Again this is an example of an hypostatization for the cause of a complex social organization is thought to be a material object. The explanation of a modern social scientist or ethnologist would be a theory involving many causes and conditions for their realization, and the cause and effect would not be from different classes of phenomena, material and immaterial. The Limit of the Mythical Idea of Cause: Pseudo-sciences Become Sciences Cassirer regards good examples of the limit of mythical thinking to be the pseudo-sciences of astrology and alchemy, developed at different time periods. In both, the causal relations detach and transfer nonphysical qualities through physical means [called emanism (II, 58)], or hypostatize nonmaterial relations into substances or powers (PSF II, 66). A new feature in relation to causal myths of customs is a higher degree of complexity combined with greater abstraction. In Astrology the divisions of the cosmos (planetary positions) are materially in the individual and there is an essence in common or a

132

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

transference of this. It is still in the realm of myth, though side by side it in history is the genuine science of Astronomy which will break away from its mythical origins whereas Astrology will not. The cosmogonical myths are regarded by Cassirer to be the most advanced types of mythical causal explanation. The highest abstraction that myth can form in causal thinking is the idea of a single law causing the entire cosmos. The origin of the cosmos, however, could only be conceived through the symbolism of a physical substance materially present in all individual things: water, air, and fire. During the evolution of these theories these origins of the cosmos lost their material associations at the same time that the principle which was temporally first in time became instead logically prior (PSF II, 50). Increasingly the symbols in myth lose their "sensuous immediacy" or they become less particular and more generalized from physical things such that some symbols, created as they are, have no direct correlate in experience while in the beginnings of myth they always do (PSF II, 212). This marked the beginning of philosophy, a gradual change, to be sure, in Cassirer's view. THE MYTHICAL THING OR PHYSICAL OBJECT As in the case of the other categories, this section presents some stages in the development of the mythical idea of a physical thing and shows some characteristic features. Using neither a merely synchronic nor merely diachronic approach, Cassirer mixes them to show the ideal unity of myth—how it has an inner form and so meets one of the criteria of a symbolic form. The Dreamlike Character of the Mythical Perception of "Things" Strong as the mythical cause may seem, it is no further from the scientific than is any other category, including "thing" (PSF II, 57, note 38). The mythical "thing" is very different from that of the modern empirical point of view. The total field of perception before the senses of the primitive is an experience like a dream or a child's cartoon in which even the tables dance. Cassirer describes it: The world of myth is a dramatic world—a world of actions, of forces, of conflicting powers. In every phenomenon of nature it sees the collision of these powers. Mythical perception is always impregnated with these emotional qualities. Whatever is seen or felt is surrounded by a

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

133

special atmosphere—an atmosphere of joy or grief, of anguish, of excitement, of exultation or depression. Here we cannot speak of 'things' as a dead or indifferent stuff. All objects are benign or malignant, friendly or inimical, familiar or uncanny, alluring and fascinating or repellent and threatening (EM 77).

He continues by pointing out that the modern mind can understand the primitive type because there is an analogous experience today ultimately derivable from its mythical origins; when someone feels an emotion strongly this feeling can immediately change a person's attitude to everything. My example is of love: it is a stereotype that a person in love is in a kind of trance and hears birds singing, sees flowers moving, feels the wind caressing him/her—in short each thing is in love, too. The following sections discuss enough features of this strange world to reveal how it has an inner form. It does not attempt to present a virtual reality of mythical perception in all its details. Different Terms for This Category Unlike other categories, the term for this one is somewhat problematic. Cassirer does use two terms with the same meaning: "the thing" or "the object" (PSF II, 43). At other times he uses "substance," but he may mean the elemental material of things(PSFII,192). The term "thing" is used by Cassirer more than "object," and this is significant for its meaning. This alone might be reason enough to prefer that term. Probably, he uses it more because the category is most characteristic of the common sense, empirical world, to which the corresponding idea in myth has a reference. Using the term may be slightly confusing for the modern mind which, in so doing, would have a difficulty in not thinking of it the way that it presently does, as it is difficult to overcome interference from one's mother tongue when learning a foreign language well. The term "object" would avoid this problem, since it is more general and is actually used more by Cassirer in those contexts in which science may also be discussed. I have preferred the term "thing" because it is more referential to the physical world of action and I will try to reduce some of the "interference" or even prejudice forced upon us by our more modern minds. The Relationships with the Other Categories The three main categories have separate chapters on them in the case of the three most discussed symbolic forms (myth, common sense called

134

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

"language," and science). The category of the thing only has a distinct chapter in the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the reason being that this volume deals with science and the ways in which myth and common sense are of a pre-scientific level of knowledge. So, it is only natural to discuss the category of thing in this volume, which would state the limitations of common sense and its characteristic idea of a thing with attributes. When Cassirer does write about the mythical thing, he usually or never adds the phrase "with attributes" because this type of physical object is characteristic of the common sense perspective. These distinctions of three different perspectives of things cannot be clear yet; nevertheless, the sense that the terms used imply different meanings and perspectives is clear. Cassirer believes the idea of a thing is suggested in the previous discussions of space, time, and number—suggested in the sense that within them there is "a kind of schematic sketch" of what other categories would be like (PSF III, 59). If this is so, then it shows that myth does have a unity of the way it forms symbols, that it does have an inner form. Naturally, the way space is formed would condition or be conditioned by the way physical objects are formed. For example, in non-Western countries the space inside of the home was thought differently; furniture tended to be put in the center of the room instead of around the walls, and this different sense of domestic space fits the different kinds of furniture traditionally present in the Japanese home, for example. It is appropriate to discuss the category of thing after the main ones. At first in myth the thing, usually thought to be correlative to the soul, is not distinct and only becomes partially so during the development of the mythical mind (PSF III, 71). A discussion of space, time, and number would then help to show how the sense of physical things emerges. Another reason for discussing mythical things after previous discussions is that there is much more misunderstanding of and even prejudice against this idea by the modern mind. It is so ingrained in our way of thinking that there are things with different attributes that we even think animals see and know the same objects. Here the mind of a modern person interferes with the process of interpretation. Surely, the mythical mind has led to the modern so it must be an inferior form of what we know is true today. When any mind interprets it must put all the data together into one picture. The means by which the modern mind most often does this is to use the modern idea of a thing as a standard and principle of unity so that the mythical attitude toward physical things from the outset must always be an inferior version of what we already know. This in-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

135

terference in the process of interpretation is also a kind of chauvinism. Yet, the mistakes arise from natural and otherwise good processes of interpretation (making the data relevant to our world and making a unified picture). As another reason, the only available methods explain why the mythical thing is more often misinterpreted. To some extent, what a thing means for the mythical mind should be determined by the image in the mind of the primitive, not by the external thing which we can never forget has the modern meaning. How can we see inside the mind of a primitive? How can we do so without seeing what we already see? It would be worthwhile to develop a multimedia, virtual reality projection of what the mythical mind sees and hears. Cassirer supplies enough ideas for a computer expert to "translate" them into an artificially presented form. The process requires some reconstruction from the use the primitives make of objects and also the types of objects that they themselves created. Sometimes Cassirer calls the method "reading" the phenomenon from the empirical data supplied by the various sciences. Some scholars resist the efforts of Cassirer to think back into a ind not very much like ours because they sense the idealistic approach and reject any version from the outset. Unlike all other idealists in history, however, Cassirer if not determines at least guides his philosophical assumptions by a vast amount of empirical data. He uses many more actual examples than perhaps any empirical philosopher does and when they do use examples they often use hypothetical ones, which of course would use the spatial, temporal, and other categories of their minds, not of the primitives. Most of all, it is hard to change one's own perspective, even if only enough to think like someone else for a little bit. Political discussions by countries of very different cultural levels shows this; it is not a mere problem of disagreement but a problem of differing perspectives (cultural experts advised politicians in the 1990 Gulf War on differences in the meaning of statements). Notwithstanding these warnings about misinterpretations, Cassirer does make his view clear enough that a different attitude toward physical things can become clear in its own perspective. Animals Do Not Know Physical Things in the Mythical Way Common sense today tells us that animals do know things with attributes. Cats do not run into objects but run around them, jump on top of them, eat some kinds of them in preferance to others, and generally behave in the same world as humans, though with less intelligence. This is

136

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

a process of understanding the animals according to the modern mind; not a process of understanding things according to the animal mind. By employing evidence from developmental psychology, Cassirer reconstructs the virtual reality of animal perception in the following way. Animals are able to distinguish different qualitites in general, depending upon the types of senses each animal has (PSF III, 120-1). Dogs, for example, rely more on smell than on sight for much behavior and the sight they do have is different in many respects from the human. But even the things they can see and hear are different in kind from the human, Cassirer insists. The qualities always have meaning only within the situation and do not have meaning independent of it; they can only cause a response or not, and the response is in an identical way. It follows from Cassirer's main point that the type of perception limits the adaptive possibilities. In Cassirer's own words, . . . it would seem that animal perception does not yet yield stable things with determinate attributes which may change in the thing itself but also possess an intrinsic property of permanence. From the complex whole of a perceptive experience the animal does not detach particular characteristics by which it recognizes a content and which identify it as the same content regardless of how often and under what different conditions it appears. This sameness is not at all a factor that is contained in the immediate experience—on the place of sensory experience itself there is no 'recurrence of the same'. Every sense impression, taken purely as such, possesses a peculiar, never recurring tonality or coloration. Where the purely expressive character of this tonality or coloration predominates, the world is not yet homogeneous and constant in our sense (PSF III, 120). For humans the thing is not inextricably woven into the immediate existential fabric of the situation but contians a "reflective character"— something merely to think about, not just to eat. Animals take little interest in mere images whereas primitives consider them sacred, more real than the things which they can represent in some of their meaning. It is true dogs can obey commands. They cannot, however, merely think of them—they are only a behavioral stimulus, as perhaps I could indicate by the fact that they do not make them themselves, or use them in situations in which they do not want some action to be realized, or invent them for their masters, or increase the number of them given to them by their masters.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

137

It is Cassirer's view that the animals have some kind of awareness of the expressive qualities of things—whether the owner is happy or angry but these qualities are not the same as they are for the human, who understands the trait as belonging to a greater complex that need not be present in the situation (the definition of representation has been discussed herein). Humans understand a thing as having a reference to other things and the reference is indicated by the image in the mind, which mediates it and makes it possible. In some languages, things have part of their meaning based on a differentiated sense of their possible location in a world; the animal environment can make no such distinctions into possible divisions of a world of things: "The Bantu languages possess demonstratives in three different forms: one indicates that the thing shown is close to the speaker; the second that it is already known, that is, has entered into the speaker's sphere of vision and thought; the third that it is far removed from the speaker or not visible" (PSF I, 203, Note 12). Cassirer does not mean that animals do not know where things are in relation to their bodies. He means that for the human a thing has meaning only if it suggests its belonging in a network of merely possible or ideal relations, as is the case here. Any thing refers to the ordering of the environment into three possible spatial divisions of a world belonging to other things at other times. When there is a capacity for this representation of the greater complex there is a capacity to imagine variations in the placement of objects or possible relations to other objects not actually present at this time but often so at other times. The First Human "Thing" Is a Physiognomic Impression or Trait The question whether sense qualities like color or sound enter the mind first is no longer one that philosophy alone answers. Developmental psychology can show that other qualities enter first. Cassirer uses the conclusions from the empirical developmental psychologist Heinz Werner: "Color and tone enter consciousness by an original experience akin to feeling, an experience in which the specifically optical 'matter' of color and the specifically acoustic 'matter' of color do not yet exist; this unity of tine and color is possible because the two have not yet become substantially differentiated—or at all events very little" (PSF III, 34). Cassirer refers to Herder and others to corroborate the view that before people can notice sharp distinctions between the various senses as qualities of external objects there is a prior undifferentiated phase common to children and primitives and in a different sense to animals.

138

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The expressive qualities that humans experience are inextricably united with the capacity of an individual thing to suggest something else and the complex in which they belong. Cassirer considers the way a simple drawing of a line is considered differently by the various symbolic forms. Concerning the difference between the mythical and the artistic apprehension of the line, he writes the following. The mythical symbol as such embraces the fundamental mythical opposition between the sacred and the profane. It is set up in order to make a separation between the two provinces, and to warn and frighten, to bar the uninitiated from approaching or touching the sacred. Yet here it does not act merely as a sign, a mark by which the sacred is recognized, but possesses also a factually inherent, magically compelling and repelling power. Of such a power the aesthetic world knows nothing. Viewed as an ornament, the drawing seems remote both from signification in theological-conceptual sense and from the magical-mythical warning symbol. Its meaning lies in itself and discloses itself only to pure artistic vision, to the aesthetic eye. Here again the experience of spatial form is completed only through its relation to a total horizon which it reveals to us—through a certain atmosphere in which it not merely 'is', but in which, as it were, it lives and breathes (PSF III, 201).

Here the expressive traits of the line are sacred or profane. The traits are more isolated, more transient, and more compelling of a response than the things with attributes of common sense. In each there is a sense of a "living efficacy" (PSF III, 73), just as everywhere "life itself shows a vague and flowing, thoroughly pre-animistic, character. It preserves a noteworthy indifference between personal and impersonal, between the 'thou' form and the form of the mere 'it'. There is nowhere an 'it' as a dead object, a mere thing; yet on the other hand, the 'thou' likewise possesses no sharply determined, strictly individual face but is prepared at any moment to lose itself in the representation of a mere it, an impersonal general force" (PSF III, 71). Cassirer means that a primitive becomes identitied with the rain god, or a parrot may be likened to a human when it is considered to be an ancestor. Cassirer's ideas provide the basis for explaining the characteristic metamorphosis of one thing into another. Since the forms in perception are in a flux and since the states of the primitive are just as fleeting, the change of one thing into another is a projection of the inner state of their

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

139

formation, or at least is correlative to the inner formative processes. On his view the individual expressive impressions that begin to arise out of the total are mediations between the inner and outer world and serve to stabilize both over a long period of time. They are not merely imaginary or psychotic delusions, for as mediations they are the moments of awareness of a sensory experience. A hot thing could burn the primitive and be considered to have an efficacy that would repel and later even the identity of some spirit. In the case of such qualitites it is easier to see their nature as mediators between inner consciousness and outer world, not psychotic delusions or merely imaginary constructions. Even science fiction writers cannot invent aliens with absolutely no qualities of anything on earth. The aliens are always unusual combinations of known qualities and changes in them. Cassirer's view of expression can explain another feature of the mythical mind; namely, the tendency to relate many things that belong to different classes. Dreams are just as important as everyday life. After all, both have the power to excite through images. Names, too, are often thought to be the same as the person, to contain the whole essence, in word magic (PSF III, 68). It should also be mentioned that perception for the primitive is much more dreamlike than it is for the modern mind. Cassirer explains his reconstruction of the first mythical perception by comparison to the more accessible experience of the child. Psychologists and anthropologists have done this. He states that the first names used by children do not correspond to fixed and permanent things as they do when modern adults use them (PSF III, 121). At first, if there is any change in the impressions, then the child cannot use the name it is learning. I can explain it by reference to a butterfly, the name for which my son has recently learned. I would show him a butterfly in a book or one on a flower or a different kind of one and he could not remember the name; he could only in the case of the same first toy butterfly he was shown. Gradually, with the repetition of the name by me, he was able to use the name for many variations of "butterfly." My example is an illustration of Cassirer's meaning. The point shows Cassirer's idea that language stabilizes mythical perception into increasingly fixed expressive unities, eventually to such abstract ones as the personal gods, which are much more constructed than the gods in natural things. The principle that ontogeny repeats phyologeny is accepted by Cassirer when writing about mythical perception and other aspects of knowledge as well. The first sense impressions are vague and do not correspond to different parts of a unified thing as they do for common sense. There is a

140

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

unity to each perception but not one clearly differentiated into attributes. The mythical "thing" is very "punctiform, compressed, distilled" (LM 90-91). In notes made for a fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer calls the object a "collection" of expressive qualities (PSF IV, 69) with the understanding that at any one time a thing does not have the entire collection. It is hard for us to imagine a total picture with parts that move all together but which are not recognizable as distinct from the rest and composed of separate qualities. If I might offer an analogy, it would be like our walking in the jungle and the foliage is so dense that we do not really distinguish separate plants but all are moving with a wind all around. Or, maybe it would be more like an experience of walking in the woods at night where vision is not good enough to permit us to use our eyes and where we only barely distinguish some general shapes but more than that feel the présense of other things and gain more a general atmosphere of the place. About the primacy over sensation and the vagueness of sensation, Cassirer writes, The primitive senses show the bare beginnings of such a determinacy [by differentiating and integrating the data from the different senses that the modern mind has learned to do]. They move essentially in an area of expressive values, which though often extremely intensive cannot be delimited from one another with any true sharpness. The data of the sense of smell, for example, seem to be differentiated primarily by such expressive characters: by the character of the attractive or repellent, the pungent or mild, the pleasant or unpleasant, the soothing or exciting. But these affective differences do not as yet lead to a truly objective distinction of qualities. Here a gradation and order such as we find in other sensuous manifolds, particularly in the spheres of tone and color, proves impracticable. On the one hand a clear spatial determination is still lacking: the smells do not adhere to definite places; in respect to localization, they are characterized by a thoroughgoing vagueness, a 'rubberlike flexibility'. This vagueness is shown by the difficulty language has in expressing itself in this field and permeating it with its power. Where language seeks to designate determinate qualities of smell, it is usually compelled to proceed indirectly, through substances which it has coined on the basis of other sensory intuitive data. A classification, such as that of color, into 'universal' names—red, blue, yellow, and green, etc.—is not possible (PSF III, 129).

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

141

Smell is an especially indistinct sense in comparison to sight and then hearing, yet in the beginnings of myth they too are rather indistinct due to the nondevelopment of the network of conceptions by which they could be known and acted upon. The general feeling of efficacy or the sacred as in mana gradually becomes differentiated into individual manifestations of the one mana or feeling of life and power. It is Cassirer's view that the primitive mind begins to make some distinctions when some forces or sounds or sights are set off from the rest. The greater intensity of these special phenomena results equally from the type of stimulus, whether a scary noise or a sharp rock, and from the type of formative processes. In other words, the primitive is not yet able to distinguish clearly its own bodily feeling and the type of stimuli that the modern mind regards as external. Therefore, part of any efficacy experienced contains some reference to the primitive's state of being when forming them, as Cassirer claims (PSF III, 69). In this way perception contains what cybernetics, the science of information systems in animals and humans and machines, an automatic feedback system of information which is self-adjusting. The Extent of the Ability to Observe the Qualities of Physical Objects Cassirer mentions the fine ability of cave men and women to draw the empirical details of animals, plants, fish, or people (EM 81). This fact would seem to contradict the idea that the perceptual field is more of an undifferentiated totality than it is for the modern mind and that the senses are vague because their ordering must be learned through time. The purpose of the observation is not the same as it would be today, and correspondingly the meaning of the drawing with its empirical differences is not the same. Myth is more a type of feeling than thinking since the thinking is at such a beginning stage. Through the drawing the primitive can feel the power of the bison, perhaps an expressive quality felt during a hunt becomes rememberable in the form of the cave drawing. And the drawing itself would have a sacred or almost magical significance transferable to others. It is not really accurate to say that the primitive sees the same lines, colors, proporitions, and shapes that the modern mind does. What is actually drawn is a total impression of the bison which evokes some expressive quality, some felt essence of the bison. There is no attempt merely to record all the sensory data; much is left out; and there may be gross errors or distortions in primitive drawings as in children's;

142

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

African statuettes have large "mistakes" of anatomical proportion. The drawing is not done for its correspondence, each part of the drawing for each sensory trait of the animal. A wholistic approach is taken. The whole feeling is conveyed by some vague traits but it is not known why these are chosen and not others or what the total group of traits are. For the primitive no mere picture is possible [LM 94, note 89], and this fact tells us about physical things. The picture is an efficacious existing thing in the same sense as the bison. I could explain it by saying that the picture presents the feeling the primitive has of the bison and because it is a presentation it is to some extent a reenactment of the bison's essence. This is another way to explain how expressive qualities function—the primitives created a way to present a moment of experience to themselves again, though the reaction is to think about the way they relate to the bison rather than merely to chase it and try to kill it. It becomes an object for thought, to show thought what it is doing when it relates to the bison. Expressive traits for the mythical mind have an existential force, to repel or to attract, to make afraid or to fascinate. They have more force for the primitive mind than for the modern and this places it closer to the animal experience which cannot consider an experience but can only experience something. In dreams the modern mind experiences the reality of its images. During sleep the body may move like the motion in the dream. Dream images may correspond to the sensations of the sleeper as when there are dream images of snow and the blanket has come off the sleeper. In this way, even in dreams there can be limited validity in the correspondence to physical objects. The Validity of the Mythical Thing and Progress in the Ideas of Things Many things in the mythical world seem to be merely false, such as the attempt to harm a person by harming a piece of his/her hair. The primitive must think about the hair in a way different from the way the modern mind does. Cassirer believes there is a degree of success in the type of perception experienced by primitives (PSF III, 62). A moment's reflection would lead anyone to the same conclusion, though Cassirer may have some additional different reasons. If there were no validity at all, then they would not be able to survive and they would not have developed higher or new forms of thinking. The same underlying principle applies to the new things that primitives make—tools, clothes, religious icons. They are mediations with the

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

143

physical world and so could not lack any meaning whatsoever. Some degree of correspondence or reference always occurs. The degree of validity increases gradually through time. On Cassirer's view it is because primitives use the things they create and thus increasingly relate them to one another, to the social scheme, and to natural things. Using them relates them, and those other things partially condition what the things could mean. Primitives may think their ancestors are parrots but this does not mean that they jump out of trees or mate with parrots. Some distinctions exist between themselves and the parrots which embody their essence. The distinctions would be supported by the possible uses of the physical parrots and the social practices in which the parrot ancestor has a role. There is another, more philosophical reason why Cassirer believes the mythical thing has its own kind of validity (PSF II, 200). The inner form or the unity of the making of the symbols is made possible through actual behavior. Through behavior things get related to one another. The relationships of one thing to another, whether a natural object or an artifact, become more and more apparent. This is a process of the mythical mind's coming to see how it forms relationships while it is doing it. The process is self-corrective, self-adaptive to the physical world. To have some kind of validity, it is not necessary for each thing to have some correspondence or for each conception to be verifiable (magic does not seem to be); its validity is its capacity to present some quality before the mind that can be related to others to build up a unified world. The First Individual "Things": Mana and Nature-Spirits The seemingly universal mythical feeling of mana and similar concepts with the different names has already been discussed with regard to the other categories. It is so general it represents a basis for the later differentiation of this "power in general" into individual powers of natural sounds and sights and things (PSF II, 159, note 3). It can be pointed out that it is not regarded as an impersonal or nonsubjective "thing" because the mythical mind has not developed enough to distinguish its life feeling from the feeling of external objects on the body. The two are mixed. Why does myth come to make some qualitative distinctions and not others? Cassirer writes about a fundamental division resulting from the type of formative power in each of the symbolic forms and in the case of myth he often seems to speak about its type of making distinctions as the dividing of the cosmos into the sacred or the profane. While this does

144

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

seem to be omnipresent, other expressive distinctions are also: the attractive or repulsive, the frightening or the pleasing. The qualitative distinctions that are made concern the most important things for the development of the mythical mind. Light and darkness are among the first, and they are important for the ordering of a world. The sun and moon and water are all universal themes of myths. Even before these individual symbols, there is the more general distinction of light and darkness. Light in religion comes to suggest knowledge and goodness; black, even beyond mythical cultures, has come to mean ignorance and evil. So the distinctions that primitives make are those that lead them on to develop their minds. More about the inherent tendency toward progress will be discussed in the chapter on dialectic. The differences between inner feelings and the outer forces of stimuli become clearer through the use of tools. Then the primitives become more aware that between their desire and reality the connection is not direct but requires a mediating object for fulfillment (PSF II, 213), and in this case it is a tool. Tools and symbols generally make the difference stronger between inner and outer, as the number and knowledge of tools increases. Only much later are the mediating objects developed enough to distinguish the inner feelings from outward objects. A function of the knowledge of things is to increase the capacity for action. The primitive can perform and think of a complex series of actions only if some phases are represented in a mythical figure such as a god, spirit, ancestor, and so on. After some degree of complexity some awareness of the form of the action, of an overall representation, is necessary for completion. The form of the action requires some awareness of the self which is obtainable only mediately through things. Cassirer's discussion on personal gods in Mythical Thought shows the importance of these figures in the development of self-consciousness. In mathematics beyond the mythical level formulas and diagrams are essential either on paper or in the head to represent multiple relations and allow the mind to perform operations on the represented relations. In myth physical things become the vehicles of self-development and once the development has been accomplished new things are formed and become the vehicles of subsequent development. Things in Cultures with Vegetation Cults There is a people called the Jagga who order their world largely according to a cult of the banana. It is not uncommon for early cultures to base

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

145

their society around a staple food item, such as corn in American Indian societies. The banana was part of their ancestor worship ceremonies and the people understood their life stages through the banana (PSF II, 184). There is, Cassirer reports, a feeling of vital unity with the banana. As the rituals became more elaborate and the explanations of their ancestors and the stages of their own lives became more detailed, they gradually came to regard the banana more analogically than metaphorically, though in Cassirer's theory the mythical symbols never have a purely analogical meaning. At this level of society Cassirer sees two types of development in seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand, the cult develops distinctions among empirical things by observing nature more, including the worshipped plants and using them as food and materials for baskets or clothing or other uses. On the other hand, these distinctions are effaced in some of the symbols such as the banana which identifies people with things and with divine ancestors, and also empirical distinctions are effaced in the "wild orgiastic dances which restore man's identity with the original source of life"(PSF II,189). The immediate felt union with a god in a ritual is a preliminary to its becoming a more explicit and particular object of knowledge; then the feeling is given a specific form in some symbol that is empirically representable. Totemism and the Awareness of Physical Things Vegetation cults slowly give way to the worship of animals as totemic ancestors. The present social structure becomes more determined. The sacred animals are individuals in a greater sense than plants were. The Malays ascribe powers especially to the larger animals, to the elephant, the tiger, the rhinocerous (PSF II, 182). Perhaps it is their size which makes them special, as the size of the sun and moon make them special in children's drawings. The Trumais of Northern Brazil identify themselves with aquatic animals and the Bororos with red parrots (PSF II, 65). They think they embody the same essence notwithstanding obvious empirical differences which they know. There is still a tendency to put things of different classes into one class. Dreams and visions of gods belong to one universe with physical things and with words; gods have a physical location and words can directly change things in magic. Cassirer terms this a low level of signification or the ability to define something through a system or network. Cassirer points out that the totemic animals do not belong to a

146

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

clearly defined genus different from the clearly defined genus of humans (PSF II, 79). The ability to think in terms of genus and species presupposes an ability to think of physical things as spatial unities of different sensory qualities; the primitive, however, has not yet differentiated feelings enough from the quality of the external stimuli in order to see a different type of unity in the two cases. Cassirer argues that causal reasoning must develop beyond the mythical level before biological genera and species can develop to a sufficient level (PSF II,180). In this case the causal reasoning means rules concerning the bearing of offspring. Ancestor worship signifies to Cassirer a merely felt sense of having come from some previous people. This sense must develop into a more empirical and analytical relation of cause. It occurs through the observation of relations between generations of plants and animals. The mythical mind only makes progress toward understanding these relations as empirical. It is Cassirer's view that this foundation for thinking of classes of plants and animals is lacking in myth. Polysynthesis and Emanism Indicate an Early Awareness of Physical Things Both of these very common types of mythical ideas are present on various levels of myth. When they first appear, things are still quite undifferentiated. In polysynthesis, the linguistic term Cassirer borrows from Lévy-Bruhl, a rain god is thought to be fully in each drop of the rain as well as in the drops of water sprinkled to make the god appear in the form of a rainshower (EM 93). The drops of water and the rain and the cause of rain (not actually a rain god) are insufficiently distinguished. More empirical knowledge must develop before they can be, though they are the right way toward that development. In emanism, qualities are detached and transferred as in scapegoatism. To Cassirer, both of these show the instability of a physical thing. The level of thought is not high enough to form stable conceptions that retain the unities of different things; instead, whenever two things become related their unities tend to break up and become fused into a new one. An analogy could be made to human personalities, which can retain their own natures in social situations if strong enough but if weak they become molded according to the personalities of those they are in immediate contact with.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

147

The Changes in Things during the Progress from Nature Myths to Culture Myths Cassirer states that it is an advance in civilization for culture myths to develop from nature myths (PSF II, 204). The nature myths require less construction of symbols and less awareness of the primitives' own abilities. The culture myths—about the origin of a society or a culture hero who manifests the traits of a people—require greater self-consciousness. During this change the metamorphosis of one natural thing into another starts to give way to more stable things that are heterogeneous. This metamorphosis is always the change of one unique thing into another. Cassirer writes, 'The cosmos is fished out of the depths of the sea or molded from a tortoise; the earth is shaped from the body of a great beast or from a lotus blossom floating on the water; the sun is made from a stone, men from rocks or trees" (PSF II, 47). For example, at first great magicians, like the Germanic Odin, can change into any of various animals (PSF II, 195). Before Homeric poetry the Greeks represented the gods as animals, whereas Homer humanized them. In fact they turned humans into animals on occasion. The Egyptians formed hybrids of animals and humans, the most famous of which is the sphinx, composed of the head of a woman, the body of a lion, and wings. Other Greek combinations are minotaurs (half man, half bull), mermaids, pan (half goat, half man), and pegasus (a horse with wings). The change from metamorphosis to heterogeneous forms represents an advance in mythical thinking, on Cassirer's view (PSF II, 47). The mind is better able to stabilize the flux of sensations. Instead of the spontaneous change of one form into another, the reltionship becomes known as a static one and the differences are represented as belonging to a greater unity of a new type of thing. The sphinx is a new type of thing, neither woman, nor lion, nor bird. These heterogeneous things are a step toward understanding an ordinary physical object as a unity of different qualities, no one of which is the exclusive essence. But the mythical mind is only developing toward such an empirical view of things and the sphinx still combines objects from different classes within nature, which shows that the causal relationships among groups of phenomena still have not become explicit. Some Egyptian statues represent a clear development in the knowledge of things. In early burial practices food and other things have practical significance for the dead pharaoh. Later, statues were put into the tombs as a kind of first realization that the mummification was not

148

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

enough. The statue became a kind of new, second mummy, though less material, more spiritual. He explains, "From the material, concrete corporeity with which the cult is originally concerned religious thought and intuition rise more and more to the pure image form. Now the statue comes to be regarded as the main assurance that the self will endure and takes its place beside the mummy as an equally effective instrument of immortality" (PSF II, 166). The statue represents an advance in the way things are conceived. They belong in larger networks of things and one thing is more spiritual by suggesting a greater complex of ideas and the sense of a person's psyche is more distinct from a merely material existence. The formative trends present in the burial statues are even more evident in the most memorable thing of Egyptian culture—the pyramid. Continuing the passage on the statues, he writes, It is this fundamental religious intuition that gives rise to the plastic arts of the Egyptians, particularly sculpture and architecture. The tombs of the Pharaohs, the pyramids, become the mightiest symbol of this spiritual trend, which aims at the temporal eternity, the unlimited duration of the I and which can achieve this aim only in architectural and plastic embodiment, only in the intuitive visibility of space. But one can only advance beyond this whole phase of intuition and representation when the ethical motif of the self becomes more sharply defined.

Characteristic of all of myth, spiritual existence can only be understood through the physical, whatever general notions and relations are conceivable can only be understood through particular images. The pyramids, however, are an advanced mythical thing, if such a large construction can be called one. It is the means by which a very advanced mythical idea can be conceived: the idea of "temporal eternity." This is not yet abstract enough to be a synonym for immortality. It means that the pharaoh will never die, that he continues to exist, though perhaps in a modified form. The life feeling is not broken. The same life feeling is felt in things and always hypostatized to some degree as a factor in the expressive quality. Once the life feeling is known as distinct, then things are no longer primarily expressive unities. Cassirer claims that Greek sculpture changed religion by humanizing it (PSF II, 195). The Greeks started to make statues of only human bodies, and of gods that had only a human form, instead of the Egyptian

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

149

statues that combined the human and the animal. The unity of the human character becomes more distinct from the animal and this allows the qualities of the animal to be seen as more clearly belonging in a separate group. In general, he believes art helps people find their image and so give them a sense of their nature (Ibid.). Astrology: Highly Developed Mythical Things in Networks of Relations Concerning the way Astrology is conditioned by "a general trend of mythical 'structural thinking,' " Cassirer writes, Here again the 'genera' of reality, the coordination of its particular elements, is arrived at first of all by the differentiation of definite spheres of magical efficacy, each governed by one of the planets . . . one element of reality cannot act directly upon every other but can act only on those elements that are essentially related to it, which stand within the same magical-astrological chain of things and events. Thus, to single out one of these chains, Mars, according to the exposition in the Picatrix, is the source of attractive forces. It has under its protection natural science, veterinary medicine, surgery, tooth pulling, bleeding, and circumscision. Of languages, it is Persian that belongs to it; of the outer organs, the right nostril; within the body, the red gall. . . . And here again the magical genus which embraces the most diverse contents of reality and composes them into a unity implies the idea of generation, of the begetter and the begotten; for whatever stands under a certain planet, whatever belongs to its magical sphere of action, has this planet as its ancestor and is descended from it (PSF II, 187). Here mythical thinking is starting to develop the idea that physical things belong in different groups in which there are causal relationships among them. In each causal relationship, though, the cause is some materially existing thing, a planet. Zeus evolved from previous storm gods and this fact shows the tendency of mythical thinking to depend less on material objects as the vehicle of ideas. The passage also shows that myth tends toward a single principle of creation and unity of the cosmos. The concept of a beginning gradually becomes the concept of the principle (PSF III, 165). Cassirer cites many examples to show that the creator can only be thought through a concrete physical process such as wood carving, or begetting children (PSF II,

150

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

207). In very late mythical developments the unity of the cosmos can be expressed as one thing: a cosmic egg, tree of the worlds, lotus blossom, organs of a human or animal body from which the parts of the cosmos come. Mythical Encounters with Modern People and Technology It might be instructive of Cassirer's theory to state how primitives would think about a helicopter or a Spaniard on a horse. I do not think they could react to it in any other way than they would to a strange phenomenon that they could enounter that was not from a much more highly developed civilization. According to reports of the Algonquins they regarded new and unusual natural phenomena as gods, always using the same word, which might mean the same god (LM 71, note 59). And when talking about English ships and buildings or plowing fields they use the same words. An example Cassirer did not mention is the reaction of Indians in the Americas to Spanish conquerers in full armor on horseback; they thought they were gods also. If something is beyond present knowledge it is regarded as holy. Following the usual process, there is a detachment and transference of an essence already known to the unknown thing. There is not the process of careful observation to note the qualities and behavior and to regard it as an entirely new thing. The Limit of the Mythical Awareness of Physical Things A good example is the cosmic element that is the origin of the cosmos. As the first principle of all things water and fire and air and others are successful in being less expressive, less anthropmorphic and more logical, and the same type of thing can act on another instead of objects from different classes acting on each other. Still related to mythical conceptions, though, water as the source of all things is also a material in it. A higher ability to form abstractions would make the unity merely logical without any material identity; the mind cannot think of such an idea without basing it on the essence of a particular thing, in this case the essence of water to flow into different shapes to fit its container; to change its properties when it changes its forms into a solid, liquid, or gas; and to be the source of life in all things. The logical ability lacking in the mythical conception of a thing is to conceive of it as a complex unity of different parts and to think of the unity as not any of these alone. A normal modern person can think of a thing by remembering just one of its aspects. What is thought of is an as-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

151

sociation of different qualities in one more general unity. This idea is something like the famous "family resemblance" of the philosopher and logician Ludwig Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, 1958, par. 66). According to this idea the thing cannot be identified by any single quality, while nonetheless there is not one type of rule or reason why all these things belong together as there is in a scientific formula of different elements. The primitive always regards a physical thing as having one essence at one time and at another time it may have another essence, but it cannot at the same time have both—such would be a unity too complex for it to understand. The complaints of Plato about the early poets come to mind. For their gods could have contradictory attitudes toward the same subject. Plato did not think that the first principles (not gods really) should be so disordered, not to mention unphilosophical and immoral. In an example cited by Cassirer, modern neurologists have concluded that the normal person can infer what a thing is from any of its aspects (PSF III, 240). When they do think of the thing they are then able to mention its other aspects. The mythical contribution is to present some basic contents of consciousness which later types of mind develop into more complex forms. From "Thou" Perception to "It" Perception The mythical mind approaches this threshold (PSF III, 123). If it succeeds in making the change it becomes what Cassirer calls the empirical, common sense, or "linguistic" consciousness. In the postmythical perception of a thing, the essence is not transferable to another thing. It cannot be detached and transferred because the essence belongs to a greater unity in which there are also other qualities, and all are bound to a spatial and temporal center. The sense of space and time and with it cause are all improved when a new sense of thing develops. Things become more distinct and more abstract thinking is possible. The post-mythical mind, Cassirer points out, has a greater capacity of understanding the relationships of things: "In the empirical world view we determine and know the 'object' by dissecting it backward into its conditions and following it forward into its effects. It is what it is only as a single link in a system of such effects, as part of a causal structure" (PSF III, 69). This mental act of "dissecting an object back into its conditions and following it forward into its effects" is too complex for the mythical mind. The modern empirical mind can think of a thing as

152

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

consisting of different aspects related by spatial and sensuous contiguity; the mythical mind can only think of one part materially related to an undifferentiated whole (pars pro toto) (PSF II, 51). The relation is merely felt, material, and not logical, not explicit, and not abstract enough to relate differnt qualities in a more general unity of spatial and temporal contiguity. It would mean that the mind would have to think of some elements in the thing in the present and compare them with some elements of another thing and of itself in a past time. A similar procedure would explain the idea of future causation. As was explained, however, the mythical mind only feels some association and immediately hypostatizes a cause as a third substance. In this way the mythical mind cannot form such complex analytical notions though it is successful in preparing humanity to be able to do so. THE MYTHICAL CONSCIOUSNESS EVOLVES FROM A SENSE OF THE SOUL OF ALL THINGS TO AN ALMOST INDIVIDUAL "I" The modern mind thinks that the true correlate to the concept of a self is an external thing. Cassirer believes that for the mythical mind its true correlate or "other" is a "thou" or an "he" or a "she" (PSF II, 175). If the world is a collection of animated forces, then the concept of the self must be different from the modern one and must in some way cohere with those forces to form a total world picture. Cassirer's attitude about the role of the self in mythical consciousness is important to note. There are chapters on the awareness of a self, of an "I," in volumes I (Language) and II (Mythical Thought) of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms but not in the third on science. Primarily Cassirer explains the evolution of knowledge on the basis of space, time, number, and then to a lesser extent on the basis of cause and thing. Personal and subjective qualities are all but eradicated in the scientific understanding of the world. In myth, however, consciousness is just a vague feeling of the solidarity of life, with all other kinds in general, and only at the end does an individual self almost emerge when myth starts to become the higher form of thought called religion or another one called ethics. Mythical thought helps humanity to achieve its first steps toward an individual self. He argues that the individual sense of an "I" is the aim of the mythical world view (PSF II, 155). Cassirer thinks the difference from the beginning to the end of myth is so great concerning its self-awareness that he claims at the beginning

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

153

we should call it the category of the soul and this changes to the category of the "I" at the end (PSF II, 157). If one category does not include this development, the fact strains the definition of a category as a universal relational concept that would show the unity of a form. Be that as it may, Cassirer might merely say the change in terms is for rhetorical emphasis or an exception, or perhaps that both categories pertain to the total form, in which case the definition would not have an exception. The Question of Animal Self-consciousness Cassirer believes that human spatial and temporal relations develop to serve as a basis for the greater awareness of the processes of the mind (PSF II, 82). If animals do not have these relations in the way that humans do, it stands to reason that they cannot develop more advanced ideas based on them. I can infer Cassirer's opinion from his other discussions on animal intelligence in the following way. Certainly, animals lack the essential human trait of symbolism or representation, meaning that a content of consciousness can represent or suggest in mental imagery and relations a complex of other contents or a whole of them. Animals, he claims in many passages, are confined to their environment and do not have this capacity to build it into a world. It is only in a world that there could be a self-consciousness, if we mean by it an ability to imagine a large variety of contents, including merely possible ones, and to see one's actions as a part of these. There can be no self-consciousness if some contents of mind, muscular feeling at the least, do not give a sense of a self in a greater complex of other qualities and relations with things. With this sense of a mirror in experience human beings can change themselves almost indefinitely, as in fact they have done. The Dawning of the First Mythical Consciousness In Cassirer's theory mythical conciousness experiences "the peculiarly fluid and fugitive character of its intuition and concept of personal existence" (PSF III, 159). This means that almost as soon as an impression is noticed another catches the attention of the earliest period of consciousness. The definition of the soul is simple life itself, present in bodies in general. The soul is a shared and communal feeling of the cosmic and life process. The general feeling of efficacy precedes the sense of individual spirits with different characters, including the primitive's own. Some names for this are the mana of the Polynesians and many other cultures, the

154

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

manitou of the Algonquin tribes, and the orenda of the Iroquois (PSF II, 158-59). The power runs through people, plants and animals, inanimate objects, and natural processes such as the weather, phases of the moon, and the sun's cycles. This one symbol precedes the differentiation of the separate phenomena. It is only after some time that the primitive can form a word for mana, and even then it does not express either a physical or psychic force but just force and life in all things (PSF II, 77). Cassirer regards mana as a success. It is a sign that the primitives live in a world, not just an animal environment. By reflecting on it and sensing it in their daily lives they can understand it better and progressively come to a greater awareness of the physical and the psychic, the outer and the inner. Cassirer believes humans must project their inner selves outward as they do in mana if there are to be any selves (PSF II, 223). Nature Spirits in Vegetation Cults At first there is no language complex enough to represent the idea of a self. Any feeling of life in general is gained through perceptual moments. Cassirer describes the various voices in the choir of life: In the rustling of the leaves, the murmuring and roaring of the wind, and the play and sparkle of the sunlight, in a thousand indefinable voices and tones the life of the forest first becomes perceptible to the mythical consciousness as the immediate manifestation of the innumerable elemental spirits who inhabit the woods: the woodsprites and elves, the spirits of tree and wind (PSF II, 201).

There is no sense yet that the self is another kind of spirit, perhaps different. When vegetation cults develop fertility rites, primitives may resurrect the dead god of nature so that the season of life and growth can begin (PSF II, 39). The dancers think they become the god during the rituals, and if they have orgies in the fields they are participating in the awakening of nature. Cassirer interprets some dancing rituals of the Arunta to mean that there is little or no concept of the individual soul, only an actualization of a collective soul which the primitives would not be aware of without the ritual and when they are not engaged in it (EM 95).

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

155

The Success of Magic in Developing Consciousness Fertility rituals precede the development of many varieties of magic for more specific social purposes. A greater degree of consciousness can be read from magical actions. In magic, he claims, there is "a translation and transposition of the world of subjective emotions and drives into a sensuous objective existence" (PSF II, 157). In more common terms, magic is defined as "a primitive 'technique' of wish fulfillment" (PSF II, 221). Though it is easy to criticize magic if it is regarded as an attempt merely to control nature or act on physical things, it is successful as an evolutionary stage. The various actions lead primitives to relate things and themselves more. Also, the mythical consciousness comes to limit its sense of "unconditioned causality" felt in magic (PSF II, 157-58). Spirits Become Closer to Primitives: Tutelary Spirits In magic primitives may call on the help of spirits. Gradually the idea arises that some spirits help people. In this way, Cassirer argues, the spirits come into a closer relation with the primitives (PSF II, 168). They guide rather than just dominate. The self feels a greater power. The thinking is still not developed enough for a sense of one's own personality, although a greater sense of it is presented metaphorically in the tutelary spirit. The power of the tutelary spirit unwittingly is assimilated by the primitive. "But there is another movement which tends to transform the outward demons into inward demons and the accidental gods of the moment into gods of destiny. It is not what outwardly befalls a man but what he fundamentally is that constitutes his demon" (PSF II, 169). Multiple Souls and Souls as Bodies within the Body Contrary to the modern idea of the soul is the sense that it is not a unity but a multiplicity (PSF II, 163). The Tshis believe in two souls and the West Africans in four. The Malays believe in seven independent souls. The Yorubas in three souls, "one dwelling in the head, one in the stomach, and the third in the big toe." It seems that the souls correspond vaguely to major affective centers of the body. On the same level is the attitude that the soul has parts in the manner of a body (PSF II, 160). The Hurons believe the soul has the members of

156

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

the physical body, perhaps smaller. "Among the Malays," Cassirer points out, "the soul is conceived in the form of a little man living inside the body." In the Upanishads, the atman or soul is a man the size of a thumb. These images that the mythical consciousness has of its own power call to mind the popular representation of the modern mind of conscience as divided into a small angel and a small devil each sitting on a shoulder and each trying to give contrary advice to someone. Conscience or individual responsibility does not begin to appear until the end of myth and then it is not yet really individual. Another corporeal attitude toward the soul is that there is a new self at each new stage of life: "A tribe in the hinterland of Liberia is reported to believe that once a boy enters the sacred grove where the initiation takes place he is killed by a wood spirit but then awakened to new life and re-animated" (PSF II, 165; and II, 109). Also, the names of some primitives change as they move into a new stage of life. Culture myths are revealing about the level of the soul. The hero or saviour represents the spirit of a people. Cassirer calls it the first expression of cultural self-consciousness (PSF 204). It is another step toward the expression of personal self-consciousness, a post-mythical idea. The Soul Becomes More Individual Yet Still Like a Physical Thing It is common knowledge that in burial practices food and drink and clothes and possessions were buried with the dead to help them in their journey and next phase. Cassirer points out that the sense that these things were practical eventually changes into the sense that they are not actually needed. In myths about the dead, particularly the Egyptian and the Chinese are cited by Cassirer, the realm of the dead is a kind of shadowy, imagined duplication of the realm of the living. The dead person is thought to perform the same tasks and have the same social position in the "new" place (PSF II, 161). A similar example is the tendency to imagine and draw the soul of the dead as a shadow with the same proportions as the living body yet some place else (PSF II, 161). In the same way all other spiritual attributes and abilities are indissociably thought with some connection to a body (PSF II, 56). The modern mind still does this when it calls someone a lion if he/she manifests courage or fierceness, albeit knowing the usage is a metaphor. What is very different from the modern perspective is the need to imagine some kind of body at the same time the soul is thought of. In

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

157

Cassirer's interpretation of the empirical data, only on this condition is there a mythical idea of the soul (PSF II, 160). Cassirer gives various examples from the Egyptian and the Greek cultures. In all of them a change of state from life to death is clear; the soul becomes a shadow of the body, which can reappear to living people. The reappearance shows how the soul is not thought to be gone forever and how it is like a physical thing since it can interact with them. Although the substantial attitude toward the soul is obvious in Homer, Cassirer sees in The Odyssey signs of an emerging post-mythical "I." Odysseus receives his cleverness from outside, in the manner of a tutelary spirit, yet he becomes independent, active and is responsible for his actions (PSF II, 160). The Representation of Distinctions between the Psychic and the Spiritual It follows from Cassirer's general principles that if there is to be an idea of the individual self then there must be representations which make the thought possible and allow the philosopher to reconstruct the thought processes. He points out an attempt in an Egyptian religion to make such symbols: This systematic differentiation of individual souls and their functions seems to be most sharply developed in the Egyptian religion. Side by side with the elements which make up the body—the flesh, bones, blood, muscles—there are others subtler but also conceived as material, from which the different souls of man are composed. Besides the ka, which during a man's lifetime lives in his body as his spiritual double and which does not leave him after his death but remains with his corpse as s kind of guardian ghost, there is a second 'soul', the ba, different in significance and in existential form, which flies at the moment of death from his body in the shape of a bird, which then wanders about freely in space, and only from time to time visits the ka and the corpse in the tomb. And the texts also speak of a third 'soul', the khu, which is described as immutable, indestructible, and immortal, whose meaning seems consequently to come closest to our concept of spirit. Here an attempt is made to define the particularity of psychic as opposed to bodily being in three different ways. But this very diversity of approach proves that a specific principle of personality had not yet been worked out (PSF II, 164).

758

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The example shows well Cassirer's belief that the development of symbols prepare the way and must be adequate enough for conceptions. The Mythical Awareness of the Soul as a Preparation for a Post-mythical Ethical "I" In Cassirer's theory, the mythical soul never achieves a fully independent sense of the individual "I," nor then of individual responsibility and ability to disobey moral laws. It comes close, though, and this is a great achievement beyond the feeling for spirit-noises in the woods. Cassirer cites the example of Egyptian texts about the fate of the soul. In early texts magic had to be used to convince the god of the dead, Osiris, to allow the soul to survive. In later texts, specifically The Egyptian Book of the Dead, the decision rests upon the judgment of Osiris on the actions of the person while alive: 'Thou awakenest in beauty at daybreak.... All evil has fallen away from thee. Thou passest joyously through eternity with the praise of the god who is in thee. Thy heart is with thee; it does not leave thee' (PSF II, 167). Immediately after this prophetic passage, Cassirer proclaims, "Thus we see in typical clarity the progress from the mythical to the ethical self." The threshold between the two types of self occurs when it is no longer just a unity of life but a unity of moral purpose (PSF II, 166). Ethical action becomes possible whereas previous action was more oriented toward the way life is. Cassirer approves of the Pythagorean advance in the thinking about the soul: 'And with this for the first time the soul gains a share in the idea of measure as an expression of limit and form as such, of the logical as well as the ethical order" (PSF II, 172). The Limit of Mythical Self-consciousness: The Struggle to Think of the Self as Not an Image of Some Body Cassirer finds the attempt to think the form of a self in the Upanishads: We see here how religious thought seeks ever new images for the self, for the intangible and incomprehensible subject, and how in the end it can only define this self by dropping all these images as inadequate and unsuitable. The I is what is smallest and what is largest: the atman in the heart is smaller than a grain of rice or millet and yet greater than the air, greater than the heavens, greater than all these worlds. It is bound neither to spatial barriers, to a 'here' and 'there', nor to the law

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 3

159

of temporality, to a coming into being and passing away, to an acting and being acted upon; it is all-embracing and all-governing. For to everything that is and everything that happens it stands as a mere onlooker, who is himself not involved in what he sees. In this act of pure contemplation it differs from everything that has objective form, that has 'shape and name'. To it applies only the simple determination 'it is, without any closer specification and qualification (PSF II, 173).

Some critical reflection on the common mythical practice of polysynthesis and emanism is evident here; for the Upanishads unite extremes previously kept apart: the I is seen as being in both the smallest and largest, but this idea is not thought to be adequate enough. The discussion of the categories completes the explanation of the common inner form of myth, the second criterion of a symbolic form. All of the categories mentioned sofar have a unity in a single principle, which will be discussed in the next chapter along with the principle of development of mythical thinking. Then Cassirer's definition of myth as a symbolic form, the first stage of his theory of myth, will be complete.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 6

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4 The Evolution of Mythical Thinking A definition of the evolution of myth called dialectical: "To the continuous building up of the mythical world there corresponds a continuous drive to surpass it, but in such a way that both the position and the negation belong to the form of the mythical-religious consciousness itself and in it join to constitute a single indivisible act" (PSF II, 237). In Cassirer's philosophy of myth, the categories of space, time, number, and so on are concepts in the mind of primitives. Together they show the unity of the inner form of myth. Since they all act in a common way, there is a law uniting them all and this law of mythical concept formation will be discussed in this chapter. This is the most general principle for the structural or synchronic unity of myth. The dynamic or diachronic principle of this type of thinking—its principle of evolution—is called dialectic, and it will also be discussed. THE LAW OF MYTHICAL THINKING How Conceptual Is Myth? Cassirer's main definition of myth is contained in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Volume Two: Mythical Thought, based on an earlier, provisional work Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken ("The Conceptual Form of Mythical Thought"). In them he emphasizes that the primitive mind has a definite form or unity and coherence so as to overturn the prevailing notion at the beginning of the century that myth was merely wrong, chaotic, or "diseased" in some way. In this work he discusses the issue whether myth can be said to be a type of thinking and concludes that the "ultimate stratum from which it rises and from which new life continuously pours into it" is feeling (69). Since there may be some question about calling the acts of the mythical mind "thinking" and using the same term for the modern mind, Cassirer defines thinking 161

162

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

broadly as "the meaningfulness of experience" or what makes every mythical phenomenon mythical (PSF III, 120, note 2). From the third volume of his main work, which has as its main purpose to discuss science, he begins to discuss myth as a matter more of feeling than thinking. This shift in emphasis is not a contradiction of his earlier views but a clarification and deepening because of the stark contrast with science. The trend continues in two later works with much content on myth: An Essay on Man and The Myth of the State. Mythical concepts are said to be "vague" (EM 97). On the basis of new developments in anthropology and the history of religion he concludes that myth is more a type of action than conception and that rite precedes myths and dominates the worldview (SMC 237; EM 79). Progress in developmental psychology, animal psychology, and theoretical biology leads him to interpret mythical thought as confined more to a field of action and fixed in form, an example being the need for rituals to be performed in exactly the same way (EM 225). This need suggested the limited power of thought to understand something with any variations and also the limited extent to which the rituals were thoughts rather than movements and emotions and images and sensations. The Success of the Idea of Inner Form Based on the Categories Does Cassirer show that myth has an inner form? How does he? The categories are concepts of relations on which more particular concepts depend for their form. The "logic" of myth is "the form of its contents" (PSF II, 59). Cassirer's discussion of them starts with the data from the particular sciences and immediately selects the data and paraphrases them so that they can be used for a philosophical purpose, namely, the definition of a worldview. For this purpose the categories must work together toward a common structure. In Cassier's terms, they must "form a system" (SF 18). They establish "a certain direction, a certain unity of perspective" (PSF II, 178). The inner form of myth, he believes, should be understood tautegorically, not allegorically. An allegorical interpretation of myth would apply standards of truth or meaning not a part of the worldview. A tautegorical interpretation defines meaning and judges its truth according to standards that are a part of the worldview (PSF III, 62). To be a worldview with "independent significance and form" the mythical phenomena must interrelate, must be definable in terms of one another, and must make a self-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

163

contained order of significance. This requirement is like that of the meaning of any language: its symbols must interrelate and be definable in terms of one another and work together for a single picture of reality. In fact, myth can have an inner form only if it forms concepts to unify its phenomena. The purpose of a concept is to have an order or a world: We can show that all the intellectual labor whereby the mind forms general concepts out of specific impressions is directed toward breaking the isolation of the datum, wresting it from the 'here and now' of its actual occurrence, relating it to other things and gathering it and them into some inclusive order, into the unity of a 'system'. . . . The apparently singular fact becomes known, understood and conceptually grasped only in so far as it is 'subsumed" under a general idea, recognized as a 'case' of a law or as a member of a manifold or a series. In this sense every genuine judgment is synthetic; and what it intends and strives for is just this synthesis of parts into a whole, this weaving of particulars into a system (LM 25).

Here myth strives toward unity, toward ever increasing general concepts of particular phenomena. It is not a coincidence that the philosopher, on his view, has the same purpose. Myth becomes a philosophical subject insofar as it can be interpreted as fulfilling philosophical aims. The theory of myth helps Cassirer achieve the more general aim of an ideal and unified system of knowledge. Cassirer would understand that there are other aims of interpretation and these would account for many differences in opinion about myth. Many of Cassirer's interpretations of the mythical ideas of space, time, and number and so on do not seem very different from the interpretations of some of the best anthropologists from whose work Cassirer gets a starting point. Cassirer "translates" the data that they have already interpreted into conceptions that can be integrated into a philosophical system of knowledge. The idea of a category is a philosophical notion, not an empirical one of the sciences, and by construing space and the others as categories they then become elements of a philosophical system—building blocks of a world view. Such a degree of synthesis of the mythical phenomena is not an aim of the empirical sciences. The categories then lead to even more general notions of the unity of the mythical world. He believes these "mediated divisions" [categories]

164

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

should be thought of by "reducing" them [simplifying them] "to a kind of primordial division from which they issue" (PSF II, 70). Therefore, the categories suggest to Cassirer one law of formation. This is not what he is fond of calling a substantial unity in which the things related are unified because they all contain a common substance or trait in common. Instead, the unity of all the categories is a functional one, meaning it does not express a single trait they all have in common but rather it expresses an aim or function which they all fulfill in their own way (PSF II, 251). All the categories create a single world in the same way, according to one law of conception. The next section shows how Cassirer develops this law. Afterward, the law can be defined. Summary of Principles of the Categories To understand the philosopher's procedure, it is best to state the principles of the categories so that their common aim becomes evident. They act in the same way; they form the world according to the same law. The following list of principles is not stated by Cassirer in this way but they are like the suppressed terms in an enthymeme, the missing but implied steps in an argument. Principles about Space, Time, Number, Cause, Thing, and Soul/I 1 They are not specific contents of mind; they are conditions of contents; they are a priori. The mythical consciousness treats them like other contents, not as higher-order relations. 2 They are universal schemata necessary for a world. 3 The concepts are the same for the human community and the natural world. 4 They can only be constructed through physiognomic qualitative distinctions, e.g. the sacred and the profane, and also others. 5 They are substances or powers or gods. 6 Space. it is not homogenous; different places have different characters which are given to the things there. Time. Different times have different nontemporal qualities attached to them. Number. Different numbers have different qualities; they are not mere relations of things. Cause. A cause is not a rule of change but is a quality of the things related. Thing. The unity of a thing is immediate and merely felt, so that it may be thought to have different essences at different times. Soul/I. The soul/I may be multiple or may change into another.

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

165

1 Space. The relations are structural, not functional. For example, in a functional space the whole is a rule from which the homogenous elements can be derived. In structural space there is a "static relation of inherence." "The distinction between position and content...Ms not yet been made and cannot be made" (PSF II, 84). Time. The stages of time (past, present, and future) are not stages which are constantly changing roles and their differences can be forgotten, e.g. in the recurrence of an identical past event or the telling of the future. Number. Numerical relations tend to be regarded as substances in the sense that numbers acquire the qualities of the things related. Cause. In causal relations, qualities of things can be detached and transferred (emanism). The relation is a substance. Things. Things change into other things close by or immediately after them in time. The relations cause an identity of substance or become a new substance or are derived from a third. Soul/l. Changes are understood as different substances, i.e. selves. 8 Space. It can never be an abstract concept or schema. For example, coexistence in space can only be understood "as a specific position of bodies in space" (PSF II, 89). Tlime. Time can never be an abstract series of relations. Succession in time can only be understood through the memory of some actual personal states or movements. Number. The numerical ordering of things can only be understood if there is something counted. Cause. A cause always expresses some of the qualities of the things related rather than being a pure relation in things with no spatialtemporal contiguity. Thing. A thing's essence depends upon the complex in which it belongs; it has the essence of something close by. Soul/I. The soul/I cannot be understood apart from a body or physical quality in which it inheres. 9 Space. Orientation in space can only occur by a remembered, felt unity of physiognomic traits. No map can be made or followed using a coordinate system or even roads (EM 46). Primitives remember the way certain landmarks strike them. Time. Orientation by time can only occur by a remembered, felt unity of bodily states or positions. No abstract daily agenda can be thought, neither before nor after the events, unless the events are actual personal states. Number. Using numbers can only occur if the meaning is based on the use of some physical objects or the body. Cause. Causes may be from different classes of things and

166

Cassirer and Langer on Myth images may be confused with real objects because the relations result from contiguity in space or succession in time. Thing. The "thing" is relatively fluid, momentary and can be a different essence at a different time or in a different situation. The boundaries between things are not sharp and permanent. Soul/I. The soul/I is only known through changes in external phenomena, sensations, and other bodily states. It is more momentary than that of the modern mind. 10 Space. The symbolism of space is "transferable" to other mythical symbols (II, 101-03). It causes changes in nonspatial matters. Time. The symbolism of time is transferable. Number.

The

symbolism of numbers, while dependent on other symbolisms, makes them more precise. Cause. A causal exlanation is not a general law, but is merely the relation associating two things in a unique event. So the relation will be similar in form to the other symbolisms at work in the understanding of the unique event. Thing. The thing is simple and unstable. So it tends to become a spatial and temporal unity of qualities except that this unity cannot be thought in myth as containing different qualities at the same time and place. Soul/I. The soul/I finally develops through and becomes distinct from spatial, temporal, numerical, and other relations. 11 Space. Spatial relations become the necessary means of thinking abstract logical conceptions (II, 91). Time. Temporal relations become the necessary means of thinking more abstract conceptions. Number. Numerical relations become the basis of more abstract thinking because they will have less of an intuitive basis. Cause. A relation depends upon the same essence being in two places at the same time. A cause belongs in a totality that cannot be differentiated, nor can the cause be differentiated from the totality, nor the cause from the effect. So cause is dependent on the symbolisms of contiguity, succession, and number, and the nature of things and selves. Thing. The mythical thing enters into more and more relations through the increasingly more complex symbolism of longer causal myths. The nature of the thing is affected by these relations and helps to develop their complexity. Soul/I. The symbolism of the self helps to lead to more ideal, less empirical notions of space, time, and so on. 12 Space, Time, and Number. Their relations are self-augmenting: the use of them requires an increase in their number and preci-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

167

sion. Cause. Causal thinking is not subject to verification; a primitive could not even understand the request to verify. However, because the relation builds up part of mythical reality, the explanations become more complex and more universal. Thing. The thing's meaning as one thing among others causes it to enter into more and more relations and to become defined further, as it defines other things. Soul/I. The ideas of soul/I cause changes in other concepts which in turn change it and so on. 13 Forming the concepts of each of the categories causes the mythical mind to improve itself and to become a higher type of mind. Conclusion about the Summary of Principles about the Categories Despite minor differences from category to category due to the specific nature of each, they relate phenomena in very similar ways. I generalize these principles from the many examples that Cassirer gives of them and the statements he makes about them. I do this to provide an intermediary step from the examples to Cassirer's claim that the same type of mental processes are at work in all of them. They order the world in a common way. In other words, they produce a single world in a mythical way. Since they form a system, myth has an inner form. This idea of inner form (the unity of the categories) can become clearer if there is one idea or law that expresses the unity of the categories. Also, then the inner form of myth can more easily be compared with other ones. The Unity of the Categories: The Law of Mythical Thinking If asked to state a principle of unity of the categories, most people would look for a similar trait in each. Cassirer does not thing this approach is the most logical, the most philosophical. He criticizes the traditional theory of abstraction based on class concepts in which a more general concept is gained by omitting some qualities of the things unified. The well-known guiding principles of the concept follow of themselves from these foundations. Every series of comparable objects has a supreme generic concept, which comprehends within itself all the determinations in which these objects agree, while on the other hand, within this supreme genus, the sub-species at various levels are defined by properties belonging only to a part of the elements. In the same way that we ascend from the species to the higher genus by abandoning a

168

Cassirer and Langer on Myth certain characteristic, thereby drawing a larger range of objects into the circle, so by a reverse process, the specification of the genus takes place through the progressive addition of new elements of content. Hence, if we call the number of properties of a concept the magnitude of its content, this magnitude increases as we descend from the higher concepts to the lower, and thus diminishes the number of species subordinate to the concept; while, when we ascend to the higher genus, this content will diminish as the number of species is increased. This increasing extension of the concept corresponds to a progressive diminution of the content; so that finally, the most general concepts we can reach no longer possess any definite content. The conceptual pyramid, which we form in this way, reaches its summit in the abstract representation of "something" under the all-inclusive being of which every possible intellectual content falls, but which ast the same time is totally devoid of specific meaning (SF 5-6).

As a result of a thorough study of concepts in modern science, Cassirer uses a different model of the concept than this one based on the Aristotelian idea of class logic. A superior model does not have the problem of creating more general concepts with less content. What actually happens through the progress of science is that as the theories become more universal they at the same time become more determinate and more informative about the world, not less. In so doing they no longer use this idea of abstraction. To form general ideas they use a model of concepts based on the mathematical idea of a function of elements (not a class of members). A functional unity can be explained in the following way. It is written in this way: F(a,b,c,d,e,. .. ), where 'F' stands for the function or principle of unity and 'a', 'b', and so on stand for the things ordered. The function means the unity of the elements in the sense of their arrangement in the series. As a particular example, Cassirer found the mythical form of causal thinking in this way. The primitive sprinkles some drops of water which will cause a rain god to cause actual water. The causal concept can be expressed as 'Cause (water drops, rain god, actual rain)'. The relationship of the members of the series is one of fusion, that is, the relationship between two things becomes an identity. To be a cause the water drops must now be regarded as sharing the essence of the rain god, and then the rain god must be thought of as sharing the same essence or in other words as being in the rain drops if he/she is to be a cause (and wholly in

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

169

each drop). This relationship of fusion between two things ordered calls to mind some concepts coined by other researchers such as polysynthesis, multipresence, and emanism, which have been defined in this study. In each of these ideas, the primitive mind seems to defy our modern idea of the spatial and temporal association of things. How can a rain god be in some drops of water and in each drop of rain at the same time? Cassirer's explanation of the causal reasoning is a principle of unity of the elements related. It is a philosophical explanation because it is a step toward explaining the difficult idea of a unity of consciousness and a worldview. Primitives do not use functional concepts; Cassirer does when he interprets their mental processes. In fact, primitives cannot use the common sense idea of a class concept. According to Cassirer, this is beyond their ability. In mythical thinking the individual quite spontaneously becomes the type and vice versa (PSF II, 181), so there is no clear distinction between levels of generality that can be fixed into extended hierarchies. Primitives know some differences in animals but cannot create a system of classifications. One type of classificatory system, the totem, results in the identification of objects on what the modern mind would call different levels of generality: the single primordial ancestor is a parrot which is in each tribe member. The primitive can form some notions more general than others, but they can become identified rather than remaining fixed and separate as in more modern types of classification. In general, all the categories act in the manner of the causal relation just cited in the example, and so the law of thinking present in them is that of a fusion or concrescence of the things related (PSF II, 110). He believes this occurs from the lowest to the highest levels of myth (PSF II, 63). For Cassirer, this law is what makes mythical thinking mythical. It can explain the indifference to phenomena of different classes: dreams and waking experience, images and physical objects, feelings and perceptions, culture and nature. He uses both terms "fusion" and concrescence," the first suggests a preconscious, instantaneous union and the second has the additional connotation of an enlargement in knowledge. Cassirer's law of mythical thinking also explains how more general notions can be formed, in ever greater fusions of phenomena: relations of relations. This enlargement of the scope of the mythical worldview is, however, always limited according to its manner of production, so that no matter how many gods and relations and distinctions there are the world only becomes a more advanced form of the same type of world.

170

Cassirer and Langer on Myth If, now, we contrast this form of logical conception by species and genera with the primitive form of mythic and linguistic conception, we find immediatly that the two represent entirely different tendencies of thought. Whereas in the former a concentric expansion over everwidening spheres of perception and conception takes place, we find exactly the opposite movement of thought giving rise to mythic ideation. The mental view is not widened, but compressed; it is, so to speak, distilled into a single point. Only by this process of distillation is the particular essence found and extracted which is to bear the special accent of 'significance' (LM 90).

Here is an explanation of the law of fusion or of concrescence from one of its aspects. Examples of the law could be found in all the categories, but many examples were given and I think the applicability of the law to them is self-evident. One more example of the way the law of fusion is formed might be useful. Cassirer cites the Christian-Germanic view of the spatial ordering of the world based on Adam's body (PSF II, 91). The primitive relates the microcosm to the macrocosm spatially by negating the distance. The parts of the body are thought to be regions of the cosmos and the different parts have the same nature: "his flesh resembles the earth, his bones the rocks, his blood the sea, his hair the plants, his thoughts the clouds" (Ibid.). Here the parts of the body are fused with parts of the earth in order to form a unified space for action. This power of spatial thinking is very concrete, almost organic, for the notion of space seems to require the muscular feeling in order to make spatial distinctions of the cosmic areas. In conclusion, since Cassirer can infer the law in each of the categories, it is a single principle for the type of mythical thinking. He believes consciousness strives toward a unified world and in so doing it must make distinctions ["division belongs to the form of consciousness" (SF 25-26)]. Each type of consciousness makes different ones, a fact suggesting that there is an expression for each type. The law of fusion describes how primitives unify phenomena and also how they distinguish them; if some phenomena are unified as sacred, the act makes others profane. The law of fusion, then, explains the form of value distinctions. It is a kind of logical explanation of the basic characteristic of myth, on Cassirer's view, to see everything in terms of expressive qualities. This means that seeing a lion as essentially courage is a preconscious fusing of the meaning of courage imagined in the mind with the percept of the

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

171

lion. The fusion can also be between percepts, as when there is a preconscious fusing of the lion's essence, courage, with a tribe member who acts courageously, resulting in the tribe member receiving the proper name "Lion," meaning the lion is in him/her. The fusion would also be present in the transfer of the essence from object to object—the wearing of a lion's fur could invest the wearer with the essence. THE EVOLUTION OF MYTHICAL THOUGHT: ITS DIALECTIC The third criterion of a symbolic form, besides having a unique symbolism and having an inner form, is having a type of development in its thought called dialectic. This idea explains how the law of fusion or more generally how mythical consciousness changes from its beginning to its end. More dynamic than the law of fusion, the idea of the mythical dialectic defines "the mode and direction of its [the mind's] production" (PSF III, 449). A General Definition of Dialectic The dialectical method has been used by classical philosophers since the ancient Greeks and up to the present day. Generally, the method helps to define different levels of knowledge within an ideal system of knowledge (past, present, and future). The common definition is the finding of a unity underlying two opposite ideas. The caricature of the method is an oversimplified version of the Hegelian dialectic as a thesis or positive idea, followed by an antithesis or negative reaction to it, and a synthesis underlying the two views. Although this simplified version of the method is not a bad start, I would like to expand it by saying that it creates a purposeful universe, a "teleological order" in Cassirer's terms (PSF I, 74). It is best to explain this by an analogy and then apply it directly to myth before I define Cassirer's idea through examples. The dialectical structure of the mythical worldview can be compared to the earth's magnetic field. There is a north pole, a south pole, and lines of force connecting the two. (This magnetism results from the gravitational field of the earth combined with its shape.) As a result of the magnetic field people can orient themselves on the earth with a compass which points to either pole. Like the total magnetic field, the dialectic of myth makes it a whole from historical beginning to end. Uniting the beginning and the end is an ideal goal. The

172

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

mythical mind encounters many contradictions and problems in its thought and corrects them as it unknowingly develops toward a goal of unity: the unity that is in all the individual contradictions. If some mythical thinker discovers this principle of unity underlying all its thought, then there is a gestalt change or change in the entire worldview. There is a revolution in thinking. The dialectic of myth, then, can be said to be like "a spiritual magnetic field" defining the orientation of mythical thought from its beginning to the point at which the worldview changes. Mythical concepts have often been observed to have a dual or contradictory value; in Jung and the Jungians Steven Walker comments on Jung's report of the myth of Wotan appearing in dreams of his patients in which it was not clearly a force of good or evil (107). This trait of duality has often been a criticism of the personal gods of the ancient Greeks, for the gods should not manifest contradictory attitudes. Admittedly, the method is difficult but not so difficult that it cannot illuminate some features of myth. It helps Cassirer develop his theory in several ways. It can explain how there is a direction in all mythical phenomena, which can be reconstructed from the products of myth (LM 89). It can explain how mythical symbols and the process of forming them develop together, each changing the other (PSF IV, 71). It can show how myth has its source of evolution and goal inside it (PSF II, 236). It can show the continuity of myth despite seemingly contrary phases of its development. And, most of all, the dialectic can explain the change in worldview, how it comes about, and how it has the universal effect that it does. The revolution in worldview can be likened to the shout of "eureka" by a scientist when he/she finds a solution to a problem and all the aspects of the problem fall into place so that they are reconceived in light of a higher unity. Another metaphor is a science fiction process I saw in a film. It was called the "Genesis Effect" and had the power, delivered through a missile, of creating new life on the entire surface of a planet very rapidly, killing any old life that might have existed. When the mythical consciousness reaches its end, it understands the former principle of its entire worldview and this revelation leads to a new world order. In Cassirer's terms: We have seen that the particular of consciousness 'exists' only in so far as it potentially contains the whole and is, as it were, in constant transition towards the whole. But the use of the sign liberates this potentiality and enables it to become true actuality. Now one blow strikes a

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

173

thousand connected chords which all vibrate more or less forcefully and clearly in the sign. In positing the sign, consciousness detaches itself more and more from the direct substratum of sensation and sensory intuition: but precisely therein it reveals its inherent, original power of synthesis and unification (PSF I, 108).

Another way to speak of a dialectic is to use James Jakóab Liszka's semiotic idea of a transvaluation in myths (The Semiotic of Myth 14). I have tried to explain the myths as processes of transvaluation, that is, not in terms of the purely formal relations peculiar to structuralism and semiotics influenced by structuralism, but as valuative relations. This approach not only characterizes the myth qua sign system in its dynamic aspect, but it allows it to be understood in its reflexive capacity—that is, the manner in which the rules and values that constitute the various levels of culture are turned back into and reevaluated in the body of the myth. In the myth, then, understood as transvaluation, one finds a condensed, sometimes displaced, sometimes distorted, version of cultural values. This valuative reconstruction of myth allows us, as Habermas says in another context, to "bring an 'unconsciously' functioning rule system to consciousness in a certain manner" (1971:23). Self-reflection, or what Peirce calls "self-control," becomes possible once the rules and sytems which constitute a symbolic process are brought to light (cp. Habermas 1971:22).

Some of these ideas are not the same as Cassirer's interpretation of myth, yet the idea of transvaluation does apply to the dialectic insofar as it allows Cassirer to explain the advance of the mythical mind to higher levels until it reaches a crisis, understands its former restricting presupposition of knowledge, and begins to change its entire worldview. Cassirer believes the dialectic is present in myth from the start. So does Lévi-Strauss. The presence of a dialectic in myth is akin to the idea of Lévi-Strauss that an initial asymmetry exists in all of the experiences of primitives: the sacred and the profane, the sky and the earth, the 'here' and the 'there', the attractive and the repelling; these differences compel the mythical mind to relate them and produce more concepts into a total world (Cited in the epigraph to Liszka's Semiotic of Myth). Cassirer sees the dialectic in all the distinctions made by the primitive mind. In particular the distinctions between the sacred and profane set up a direction in the mind of what is most important to think about—the sacred (PSF II,

174

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

260). More than any other expressive qualities, these define the direction of the mythical mind to its highest levels and point the way to religion which can surpass the limits of myth. Nevertheless, other distinctions through expressive qualities would also have some role in leading the mind to more advanced conceptions (PSF II, 255). The Definition of the Mythical Dialectic As a general principle like Ariadne's thread to help the reader through the discussion, the mythical dialectic is "a conflict of two movements" in any act; namely, the first movement is the creation of its image which cannot allow the second movement, its placement in a network of ideas, to proceed beyond a certain level of development. These two constitutive acts of any experience work at cross purposes. They limit the development of the mythical mind (PSF III, 441). The entire course of the mythical mind is to work toward overcoming this situation. Sometimes the two contrary creative acts are described as a single "naive indifference of image and thing" (PSF II, 252). In Cassirer's words, the conflict of two movements involves the type of image and the network of meaning in which it belongs, which limit the possible level of mind: It [mythical consciousness] does not move out of its sphere or pass into a totally different 'principle', but in completing its own cycle it ends by breaking through it. This fulfillment which is at the same time a transcendence results from the relation of myth toward its own image world. Myth can manifest itself only in this image world; as the mythical consciousness advances it comes to see this manifestation as something 'outside' which is not wholly adequate to its own drive for expression [the image cannot convey a new type of worldview]. Here lies the basis of the conflict, which becomes gradually sharper and sharper, which creates a cleavage within the mythical consciousness and yet in this very cleavage discloses the ultimate depths of myth (PSF II, 236).

In more concrete terms it can be said that the mythical concepts are always limited because they must be presented through sensory traits. At first numbers can only be thought if objects are being touched. The pyramids give a shape to the idea of temporal eternity. The soul can only be thought through physical imagery. The mythical mind develops ever

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

175

more advanced conceptions of the soul though they all repeat the need to represent it as a shadow or some other physical thing (PSF II, 161). This reference to ideas about the soul shows the unity of two contrary movements: the building of myth leads one step closer to its being surpassed (PSF II, 237); there are more advanced ideas about the soul and these lead to the awareness that the type of conceptualization is forever limited. Illustrations of the Twofold Movement Some brief references of Cassirer to the dialectic in specific contexts can help to fix the idea in the mind and prepare for the discussion of slightly longer examples. Cassirer states that the idea of space begins in very specific experiences of the human body but the parts of it can be thought to be the model for the regions of the cosmos (PSF II, 93). Also, primitives can follow the course of a river without being able to draw or use a map (which would require a schema of spatial relations without a reference to the primitive's body in particular). Here the need to think the spatial divisions of the universe through the human body limits the possibilities for spatial relations. Number is an example. "Every mythical number," he writes, "points back to a definite sphere of objective intuition, in which it is rooted and from which it continuously draws new power" (PSF II, 148). In other words numbers cannot be thought without references to some physical things or without having some properties of physical things or expressive qualities. The need for this type of symbolism limits the network in which it can have meaning. Pythagoras hypostatized the number ten into a religious entity having the shape of a pyramid of ten dots. Whatever beginnings of mathematics can be found in his ideas on geometry are indissociably linked with the qualities of the sacred and with shape. Higher mathematics is not possible if the numerical relations must have an individual, one for one, relation to physical objects—irrational numbers, negative numbers, infinity, algebra with variables. An explicit short illustration of the dialectic is given by Cassirer when he discusses ideas of creation. In Egypt an egg first issues from Nun, the primordial water; from the egg in turn emerges the god of light, Ra, the sun god. He came into being before there were any heavens or living creatures; no one was

176

Cassirer and Langer on Myth with him in the place where he was, and he found no place on which he could stand. This shows, on the one hand, that in order to take determinate form the mythical idea of creation must cling to some concrete substratum, but that, on the other hand, it seeks more and more to negate this substratum, to tear itself away from it. We find a progressive series of such negations in the famous hymn of the Rigveda (PSF II, 209).

The two movements of the mythical dialectic are that the primitive mind must create a symbol in which an idea is presented as the essence of a physical thing; the contrary movement is that the mind tends to universalize this essence into a network of relations and meaning covering the totality of the mythical worldview. Obviously, water, an egg, and then light restrict the types of relations that can be thought to order the universe, especially missing are quantitative relations in this cosmology which is primarily based on qualities. As another illustration, in primitive religions the primitive feels a cooperation with nature and its demonic powers (in a neutral, good, or bad sense) is necessary (EM 100). The agency to be cooperated with is tantamount to a force with physical efficacy or imagined in bodily form. This agency, nevertheless, belongs to a group of related conceptions in which it acquires meaning. Cassirer states that the religion of Zoroaster, as one example, changed the limitation of religious thought by not referring the network of religious conceptions to a special kind of physicalpsychical force but by referring it to the good will of a person on which the means toward goodness would have to be based. The advancement of thought depends on a change in the type of symbolism. Although he does not mention it in this context, the advance in thought means that the ideas show a greater ability of the religious thinker to form ideas of greater universality and determinacy. The two contrary movements of mythical thinking are evident in the evolution of notions of the divine. Before the personal gods of Homer and Hesiod there were "momentary gods" as defined in the work of the German scholar Hermann Usener (SMC 174). They did not have a definite form or name; they seemed to disappear immediately after they were thought or, better, felt; and little explanation of them was possible. This shows that if the symbol is too physical and not articulate enough, then the network of meaning in which it can be interpreted is correspondingly weak. The two, though in the long run working at cross purposes, do act

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

177

together to make individual experiences in myth, and by their conflict lead to more advanced conceptions. The limitations of the momentary gods are surpassed by the personal gods of Homer and Hesiod (EM 90). They are successful as a transvaluation of the momentary gods and the animal worship and totemism before them, whereas their anthropomorphic character will in turn be surpassed by an idea of impersonal law. This idea is already beginning to emerge, Cassirer claims, as the mythical figure of moira, the law represented as the three fates, originally thought of as old women making, measuring, and cutting the length of a mortal's life (PSF IV, 100). Moira represents the sensuous, expressive symbol while the order they control over time and destiny represents the network of concepts in which the image gains meaning. In Cassirer's words, "Again and again we meet with this notion that the entire course of events in time stands under the control of a single force, which itself does not belong to events and is not defined by them. The order, according to which time moves on and according to which everything that happens is granted a particular length of time, a limited life span, is not itself something which has come about. It is a being, something nontemporal and eternal." Cassirer believes the advancement of the mythical mind through stages of this mythico-religious dialectic to more difficult conceptions continues until philosophical idealism "renounces the attempt to force the intelligent order, which it conceives the divinity to be, into the form of an individual being or an individual personality" (IV, 101). So philosophical idealism can escape the endless repetition of the mythical dialectic if it consciously repudiates the type of symbolism requiring the representation of all ideas through physical and expressive qualities. The result is that new possibilities open up for the enlargement and the qualitative enhancement of "the intelligent order." When myth is surpassed in this way, Cassirer believes a new "feeling of the self and of self-consciousness occurs. With an advanced understanding of the world, there comes at the same time a greater inwardness or understanding of the self. Sometimes Cassirer speaks of the dialectic in myth as a struggle between the "I" and the world until they become separated enough that the primitive develops a sense of individual responsibility, which depends on the ability to represent the self in symbolism, in language, not requiring the self to be presented through physical qualities. All these brief illustrations serve to define the two contrary movements on all levels of mythical experience.

178

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The Evolution of One Myth into Another In Cassirer's theory, the changes of the mind to a higher level of myth occur throughout the worldview (PSF III, 335). It would happen from the very beginning of myth, though before the development of mythical tales the dialectical opposition between the symbol and the system would be hard to define. In tales, though, the dialectic becomes easier to see—the more advanced they are, the more defined the dialectical opposition in them. Unfortunately, Cassirer does not present a single sequence of the evolution of one myth into another. For example, such a sequence might be possible from Sumerian myths to Egyptian to Greek philosophy. He does suggest the possibility of a direct line of descent when he discusses the origins of pre-Socratic philosophy, especially the sixth-century B.C. figure Pherecydes of Syros (PSF II, 129). If the most developed and complete mythical tales evolve into one another, then it follows from Cassirer's view that their structure would be dialectical. Then a mythical tale would be like a microcosm of the macrocosm of the mythical worldview. The eventual limit of their truth would be present from the start, just as the limiting factor in the symbolism is present from the start (PSF II, 24). It is something like saying that a person is slowly dying as they are living. The two movements coincide. The modern mind is accustomed to expect that any scientific theory will have problems in it that will be rectified by a theory with new presuppositions. This attitude toward myths—that they evolve one into another— makes them rudimentary speculative discourses. G.S. Kirk in his recognized Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures has as a main goal to "rehabilitate" myths by regarding them as speculative, as having truth value and as developing one into another (Preface vi). Ironically, though perhaps myths are speculative, he does not believe that they can have a single form or that a universal theory of such a rich field as mythology is possible (2). This apparent schism in attitude is clarified when he takes issue with Lévi-Strauss for believing myths are the solutions to paradoxes and in turn generate new ones (7). Kirk believes there are many myths that do not fit this pattern and that no one form of myth can be defined because their purposes vary so much from culture to culture. Cassirer can be provisionally justified by pointing out that he and Kirk clearly do not have the same goals of inquiry so that their standards of success are not the same. Certainly, Cassirer would agree that there is not just one sequence of the evolution of myths. Cas-

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

179

sirer's claim about the dialectic of myth is more general: whenever myths do advance into higher forms then they would do so according to his ideas about the law of mythical thinking and the dialectic. Cassirer makes some additional suggestions about the possibility of defining a sequence of myths dialectically evolving one into another. The example is that of the paradoxical status of Zeus and moira in Homer's writings: moira is emerging as the superior impersonal power though sometimes it appears as if Zeus still has the prerogative of dispensing justice and order (PSF II, 116 and 132). The ambiguity leads to a new myth defining their relation more clearly, namely, in the work of Hesiod. But these myths are proto-philosophy and so they show speculative, dialectical relationships more clearly than very old myths would. Perhaps historically before myths can seem like speculative solutions that culminate in new paradoxes, there was not such a clearcut relationship among the ideas. In this case, it would not be a question of the solution of one paradox in a succeeding myth but merely the transmission of the story of a people from generation to generation, with changes occuring in the process. One account of transmission, given by JeanFran_chois Lyotard, emphasizes the need for myths of successive generations or even successive tellings to interlock with previous ones (The Differend 105). Cassirer's idea of dialectic could apply to these tales. In one movement of the dialectic, the "system" of ideas would be those defined in the tale and those known in the culture that would be necessary to make the tale intelligible (the cultural context). In the correlative but contrary movement the sensuously presented symbols would be needed for the group of related ideas to be thought—particular gods, spirits, or ancestors. Instead of attempting to define the evolution of one specific mythical tale into another, Cassirer gives three main examples of religious movements in general as they advance beyond the level of mythical thought. The Dialectical Evolution in the Prophetic Books of the Old Testament During the progress of the mythical worldview, the image is gradually recognized to be different from real physical things, and when it is finally

realized the religious worldview has begun (PSF II, 239). Cassirer considers the following example to be paradigmatic. The Prophets try again and again to lead the people beyond the immediate

180

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

physical intuition of God; He should not have the traits of physical things; idolatry is forbidden (PSF II, 240). From the mythico-religious to the religious attitude proper there is a change in attitude toward the making of symbols and to the other movement of the dialectic, the interpretation of them in a network or relations, the system of religion. Cassirer explains the difference in the attitudes: It is as though a chasm unknown to the unreflecting, naive mythical consciousness had suddenly been opened. The polytheistic world, the 'pagan' view combated by the Prophets, was not guilty of worshiping a mere 'image' of the divine, since for this view there was no difference between the archetype and image as such. In its images of the divine the polytheistic world still held immediate possession of the divine itself—precisely because it took these images never as mere signs but always as concrete-sensuous revelations. In a purely formal sense the Prophetic critique of this intuition therefore rests on a kind of petitio principii, for it imputes to this view a conception which is not inherent in it but is brought to it only through the new perspective in which it is placed. With passionate zeal Isaiah assails the folly of man worshiping his own creation and venerating as divine something which he knows to be his own product (PSF 240).

When Cassirer writes that the Prophetic critique "imputes to this view [that of the pagan religion] a conception which is not inherent in it but is brought to it only through the new perspective," he is pointing out that the Prophets not only have a more ideal attitude toward mythical symbols that makes them religious but also the words show that the change in attitude toward the previous symbolism is accompanied by a new system of religious interpretation. If the emerging religious consciousness is able to surpass mythical thinking, if it is able to escape the repetition and confinement of that dialectic, then it is Cassirer's view that the symbol and its system of interpretation, the two contrary poles in any dialectical conception, will change. The images of myth are regarded as "merely outward and material," while the system of interpretation is now based on a new relationship between a person and God, "a spiritual-ethical relation" according to which any relationship not interpretable by this primary one will become revised (II, 241). While the insight into the new relationship to God may occur in a flash, a moment of conversion, of course building up the network of new religious notions in the system of interpretation would

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

181

take time. The previous mythico-religious symbols become interpreted as "dead 'things' "; the idea of a dead thing is not actually possible in the mythical worldview, for everything, especially those things sacred, have an expressive, vital quality or efficacy. What is felt to be significant, the direction in which the symbolism will take, is new. There is a kind of reversal in the changed attitude toward the symbolism: what was formerly sacred becomes a sacrilege. This type of change is typical of a change in worldviews, in revolutions in thought. Along with the change in attitude toward external symbols, there is a change in the thinking subject. It is more inward or more aware of its own processes, more individual, more ethical, less controlled by some external force. It does not have to represent itself as if it were a body but can instead represent some of its spiritual qualities allegorically. God, too, is understood without predicates for physical things. The breakaway of the early Prophets from the mythical worldview seems to be either a process that can never be completed by Christianity or a process that recurs at ever higher levels of thinking (PSF II, 248). Cassirer does not clearly state which is the case, or whether both are. Just as the mythical dialectic occurs again and again, so too there arises a dialectic in the new symbolic form of religion. Religion surpasses the level of myth and as a type of worldview acquires in the same act its own dialectic. Parallel to the dialectic of myth, that of religion is based on a conflict between the mental movements of making the symbol and the movement of interpreting it in a system of meaning. "The entire history of dogmas," Cassirer writes, "from the earliest beginnings down to Luther and Zwingli, indicates a constant struggle between the original historical significance of symbols, sacraments, and mysteries and their derived, purely spiritual meaning. Here again the ideal develops only very gradually from the sphere of material, empirical reality. Particularly, baptism and the Eucharist are at first evaluated entirely in this empirical sense, according to their immediate efficacy" (PSF II, 248). Cassirer believes that religion always forms its symbols by transforming mythical ones. This force against change, he insists, actually helped Christianity survive cultural changes, though the credit is due to the resistance to change characteristic of the mythical images on which the new religious ones are forever based. As in the case of myth, the symbols of religion are at cross purposes with the system of meaning in which they are interpreted. This means that the symbols determine certain limits in the conceptual possibilities of the worldview. Although Cassirer does not give this example, I could suggest the

182

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

example of the Protestant Reformation. It marks a more secular attitude toward the symbolism of the Catholic church: the Virgin Mary is no loner divine; almost no icons in the churches; greater simplicity in the ceremonies; a new attitude—more secular toward the priest; greater responsibility for each person to seek salvation and less dependence on observance of church ritual. With this changed attitude toward symbolism goes a changed attitude toward the system of religious meaning. Great conflicts arise in the interpretation of the Bible. The conflicts are so great that the different groups of interpretations are seen as exclusive and as belonging to different churches, different institutions which will have their own separate traditions and histories following the split. And there are many more splits after the original Reformation led by Martin Luther. The Dialectical Evolution of the Persian-Iranian Religion from Myth Similar changes occur in the attitude toward symbols; the truly religious symbols are not physical things, and especially God cannot have physical predicates but only spiritual and ethical ones (PSF II, 241). As in the case of the Prophetic critique of pagan religion, the new system of meaning is based on a new ethical tendency. The change in attitude toward religious symbols is at the same time a change in attitude toward all symbols, even the symbols of nature. This fact shows that religion is a worldview. Its fundamental concepts cause a reinterpretation of the whole of reality. In the Persian religion, he claims, natural things cannot be divine and cannot come in direct relationship to the divine. Instead, one goal in the developing system of meaning is to redefine the role of natural things. Cassirer points this fact out to show how the former mythical images must be transformed into religious symbols progressively, since it takes some time and some development of the newly won perspective to make explicit the new type of thinking that has begun (II, 242). It is not the case that the mythical worldview can be changed in one instant and that its type of thinking is merely anulled or discounted entirely. Cassirer's view allows for the continuing role of mythical thinking if it is subordinated and only insofar as it provides the raw materials, so to speak, for new religious symbols. I can draw this conclusion from Cassirer's view. This negative role of the mythical images is nevertheless a guiding role. The new religious consciousness will gain part of its direction by completing the changes in attitude toward the

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

183

old way of thinking. What is more, the mythical images and interpretations "remain in existence as lower demonic powers, which appear insignificant beside the divine and yet which even after they have been recognized as 'illusion' in this sense, are still feared as a substantial and, in a sense, essential illusion" (II, 243-44). The Persian religion has a distinctive dialectic, valuable as a more advanced form of that found in myth (II, 243). Cassirer defines the guiding role of the change in mythical images and the consequent new religious dialectic in this way: Here again we can clearly see how the purely mythical elements which originally underlie the Persian religion as they do every other religion are not simply suppressed but are progressively transformed in their significance. This gives rise to a characteristic involvement, a peculiar coodination and correlation of natural and spiritual potencies, of material-concrete existence and abstract forces. In certain passages of the Avesta, Fire and Good Thought (Vohu Manah) appear side by side. . . . This involvement and merging of abstraction and image constitute an essential and specific trait of Persian religious doctrine. The conception of the supreme god is indeed fundamentally monotheistic—since ultimately he will overcome and destroy his adversaries—but on the other hand he is only the summit of a hierarchy to which belong natural as well as purely spiritual powers (PSF II, 243).

Cassirer continues to define the dialectic in the Persian religion by stating how it is reduplicated in the view of nature. Suffice it to say that the dialectic in myth is truly comprehensive of all aspects of the worldview. Like a laser in which all the light rays are made to go in the same direction, the dialectic progressively makes the similarity of direction in all the aspects of the worldview clearer. This would be even more the case for more highly developed worldviews such as science. The Dialectical Evolution Beyond Myth by the Upanishads and Buddhism This example resembles the previous two main ones. There is a changed attitude toward mythical symbols, a new system of meaning, and a new symbolization of nature. One feature not mentioned before by Cassirer when discussing the two examples is that the whole world becomes redefined to the extent

184

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

that the things have a relation or do not to "the religious process and its center. This center is essentially the sole reality" (II, 246). An extremely important consequence of this claim is the self-reflexive nature of religious thinking: "Here [commenting on Buddhism] the basic act of religious synthesis is such that only the process itself is ultimately apprehended and subjected to a definite interpretation, while every supposed substratum of this process dissolves and finally sinks into nothingness" (II, 247). I might add that as religious thinking develops there would be an increasingly greater self-awareness and ability to revise one's thinking because the process would be increasingly manifest in symbolism. The same principles apply to myth. Myth has a center to its process. What is important and what is not are defined by it. Value distinctions establish directions of mental activity. The center is defined by the law of fusion and its dynamic correlate, the mythical dialectic. In mythical thinking there would be less self-awareness than in the religious and less capacity to discover the process of one's thought in the symbolic products, though the potential for some discovering of course has been discussed. THE MYTHICAL DIALECTIC AND THE THREE PURPOSES OF HUMAN CULTURE According to Cassirer there are three overall purposes of human culture: self-knowledge, self-liberation or freedom, and the unity of a world (EM 228). These goals are accomplished during the course of the dialectical advancement of the mythical mind and when the religious consciousness surpasses it. Self-knowledge means that the mythical mind becomes aware of its own mental processes, to the extent that this is possible in myth. At first, for example, there are no words for numbers and gradually the activity of forming numerical relations becomes more explicit. On Cassirer's view symbols function self-reflexively so that in relating them the processes of their formation become evident. This occurs because part of the meaning of a symbol—the condition of meaning—is the belonging to a larger totality of possible mental contents. While self-knowledge occurs in any act of mythical knowledge (for human knowledge is at the same time self-knowledge), the most striking example of it occurs when the mythical mind understands its own limitations and there is a dialectical revolution leading to the emergence of the

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

185

religious consciousness. Myth also develops into other symbolic forms, particularly common sense or "language." When the human mind overcomes the mythical dialectic it can do so because it realizes the dialectic that had been forming mythical thought all along and that had been restricting its further progress. Such a procedure occurs in other cultural contexts when scientists revise the assumptions of their theories—assumptions which they at first did not know that they were making. Often such a change in assumptions is called a Copernican revolution, as in Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. When self-knowledge occurs, the symbols being formed reveal the process of their formation and so the person knows more about the formation of the world and experiences an increased power (LM 99). Selfknowledge brings self-liberation, not in a political sense, but in an epistemological sense of freedom from sensory things, freedom to think more difficult and more universal conceptions, freedom to act in new ways and to behave more ethically. In many passages Cassirer cites the restrictions of mythical thinking. The rudimentary means of symbolizing restricts their possible systematization into a world, although myth does represent a necessary advance upon animal intelligence. Just as there was an advance upon the animal environment, which confined animals to a system of stimulus and response, so too the religious consciousness and common sense consciousness free the mythical mind from its confinement to symbolizing ideas as physical properties. Primitives are much more bound to "the compulsion of the sensory drive and the immediate need" than the modern mind is—they have a life more dominated by their biology (PSF III, 276). The mythical mind has a kind of relation to things different from the animal and this new human kind of relation is further improved when myth changes into other types of symbolic formation. Although the advancement of religion over myth has been discussed, the aspect of the mind's liberation should be elaborated, a process Cassirer believes is characteristic of culture in general and is thus repeated throughout future cultural changes in analogous ways. Religion changes the relationship of the mythical soul to the world. The mythical soul only gradually gains the self-knowledge of its own individuality; it is the ideal aim of myth, which it can never fully achieve. Religion does achieve the knowledge of an individual soul/I, however, as does ethics. After the progressive differentiation of the soul/I and the world throughout myth, a new type of mind comes out of "its captivity in mere material existence, in sensory impression and affectivity, and

186

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

becomes a spiritual consciousness" (PSF II, 13). The lack of a sense of one's individual self is manifest in the Arunta people cited by Cassirer: They 'set up by means of their dramatic rites a sort of timeless Alcheringa into which they can turn aside from the hardships of their present lot, so as to refresh themselves by communion with transcendent beings who are at once their forefathers and their ideal selves. For the rest it is to be noted that of distinctive individuality these supermen of the Alcheringa have almost none. The chorus seeks simply to glut its collective soul with the glamour of ancestry—with the consciousness of kind. The mana is which they participate is tribal' Faith, Hope, and Charity in Primitive Religion, p. 36 (EM 95).

Religion changes the "consciousness of kind" into a new feeling of individuality because the self can be related to the divine being without the mythical intermediary of the Alcheringa. The feeling of liberation is described in this way: " . . . the great religious teachers of mankind found a new impulse by which, henceforward, the whole life of man was led to a new direction. They discovered in themselves a positive power, a power not of inhibition but of inspiration and aspiration. They turned passive obedience into an active religious feeling .. . [they detect] a more profound sense of religious obligation [than in the taboo system] that instead of being a restriction or compulsion is the expression of a new positive ideal of human freedom" (EM 108). Even in the modern world when someone undergoes a religious conversion there is an experience of exhilaration, freedom, joy. Einstein, too, wrote about the great joy he felt upon thinking some new concepts in science; they would bring a kind of liberation from previous restricting notions and open up rather suddenly a new vista of meaning which, to be sure, would have to be delineated progressively. "Epistemological" Liberation from Myth through the Common Sense Worldview (Language) up to the Modern Scientific Worldview The religious example of a mental advancement upon myth helps to explain the dialectic of myth and the limits of the mythical worldview. The example is not the only one and other ones are better for showing the "epistemological" liberation. The following example does this. I extend

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

187

an example given by Cassirer through the perspectives of two postmythical worldviews to show the sense of a change in the attitude toward symbols and the way they relate to make up a world. Cassirer gives an example of what some primitives do when they are wounded by an arrow. Based on Cassirer's philosophy, I extend the example by describing the common sense or the empirical reaction. A warrior after being shot with an arrow may hang it in a cool place to lessen the pain or even put a lotion on it. The remedy seems totally absurd unless one understands that, for the primitive, the enemy causing the pain subsists in the arrow after the wound occurs. The primitive warrior tries to mitigate the wound by affecting its source. In the post-mythical empirical worldview, called "language" by Cassirer, people react differently. They wound not hang the arrow because the feeling of pain and the sight of the arrow do not become fused in the perceptual process. Common sense can distinguish the wound from the arrow, just as a rock can be distinguished from a log or from any other material object. In modern life people can realize that the arrow before striking is the same object after striking so that the arrow does not continue to cause pain when no longer touching the wound. There is no spirit of an enemy in both the arrow and the wound, so magic does not work. A primitive feels that the arrow continues to cause pain after its removal, and he consequently treats it in addition to the wound. A primitive sees a pain-inducing enemy, the arrow; a person who intuits sees a wooden shaft with various attributes, brown, hard, sharp, and long. Of course, the primitive can distinguish colors, determine shapes, and compare sizes of empirical objects, but this ability was earned during the evolution of the mythical consciousness and primitives do so only in a lesser capacity than more highly developed mental types and then only in the service of magical or religious ends. The ability to distinguish perceptual qualities as attributes belonging to a thing occurs in a reduced, as of yet undeveloped capacity. The relations of space and time are not yet sufficiently abstract for the primitive to be able to understand the more abstract spatial-temporal unity of a thing with various attributes (Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" of the qualities of a thing—they seem to belong together as one thing although the unity cannot be explained other than the spatial coexistence of the properties; from Philosophical Investigations, 1958, par. 60). If the primitive were able to do this, the primitive certainly would not continue to feel some kind of bond between the arrow and the wound after the arrow is no longer in contact with it. However, feling predominates over thinking and the relation

188

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

between the arrow and the wound is a felt one relative to the more conceptual one in the modern empirical worldview. The statement that the Indian "sees" a pain-inducing enemy, therefore, does not mean that some kind of hallucination occurs; it means that the only way the Indian can relate the different perceptions and sensations is to do so by unities of feeling, not by more abstract unities based on impersonal and general Schemas of space and time. To the primitive the arrow is an incarnate enemy because there is no other means to conceive the situation. It is not the case that the primitive first sees what the modern mind would call an arrow with attributes and then poetically calls it an enemy. This expressive knowledge of the arrow differs greatly from the emotionally neutral arrow, the intuited wooden shaft, with its various qualities. This change in the type of perception from the mythical to the modern empirical one is dialectical in Cassirer's theory. The relationship between the arrow as a symbol and the attempted remedy using causal reasoning as the system of meaning changes when the mind becomes postmythical. The mind experiences an increased power of behavior; certainly the magic of the primitive has less empirical success than the cleaning of the wound followed by the application of a cloth bandage to the wound. In Cassirer's words, "the tension between the world to which the sign itself belongs [the perceptual relations of the arrow with the wound] and what is expressed through it [the idea of an enemy in both the arrow and the wound] has attained an entirely new breadth and intensity, and a new and intensified consciousness of the sign is also manifest" PSF II, 257). According to Cassirer, in symbolic expression there is a correlation and conflict of an image with its system of meaning (PSF II, 260). The better empirical attitude changes the type of symbol and the perceived relations of the arrow with the wound; this new symbol is interpreted through the nonperceptual idea of the arrow as a "dead" nonexpressive thing with attributes. Ideas of space and time are also changed, which preclude the use of magic. According to Cassirer a "scientist" would act quite differently. In this example the person with scientific knowledge, a kind superior to the ordinary common sense or empirical knowledge of modern life, might be a doctor. The ordinary intuition of the arrow as a thing with attributes is a lower type of knowledge than science. People intuit a thing as a conglomerate of attributes which only form "a relatively loose fabric" (PSF III, 432). The scientist rejects this "pseudocontinuum of sense," replacing it with a "genuine continuum" or a closely woven fabric of meaning (PSF III, 430). Scientists distinguish and analyze sensory qualities to

Myth Is a Worldview, Part 4

189

tranform them into "determinations of number and measure" (III, 436). While the datum of intuition is an attribute of a thing, the object of scientific perception is a sensory quality separate and determinate by itself. Instead of the sharpness of the arrow, an intuited property, the scientist perceives an angle limited enough to penetrate the skin. Instead of the quite hard force of the arrow he perceives a mass with sufficient velocity to spear the human body. A person who intuits and who does not analyze sense data only perceives a thing loosely made up of properties. It is a spatial-temporal unity of things which—as a result of sensation—belong together. The unity of an object in science is understood more; it is not merely presented to the senses. The object of physics differs from any perceptual data that becomes quantified into new scientific symbols. The resulting object is "a totality of constants" without "smell or taste, color or tone," shape or texture" (III, 436). These are traits that depend upon the human body and must be generalized for science to think in a more determinate and universal way than the ordinary empirical view. Just as the ordinary empirical perspective eliminated the expressive qualities of the mythical perception of the arrow, the scientist eliminates the ordinary sense qualities immediately gathered in sensation in orde to make them into more precise quantifiable units capable of being directly explainable by more universal laws. After distinguishing and quantifying the data of perception, he can form laws and systematic relations to explain determinate phenomena. From these laws the order and nature of things is known much more precisely than in common sense. By distinguishing the total state the scientist can relate factors in one state to factors in another. The relation of the arrow in the state before the wound to the arrow in the state after the wound is irreversible. The damage has been done. Consequently, hanging the arrow could not directly affect the wound, still being felt by the primitive. The primitive, Cassirer claims, can hardly distinguish specific factors from their total state and relate them to data in another state. He/she fails to distinguish the sight of the arrow from the feeling of pain, two factors in his wounded state. The feeling of pain and the sight of the arrow become fused in the perceptual process. In this example the visual character of mythical perception differs from that of scientific perception. The primitive warrior "sees" a pain-inducing enemy (the arrow); the scientist may see neutral sense data as a starting point for determining relations that cannot be seen (the functioning systems of the human body and possible changes). Actually the distinct phases in this situation would be medical. A doctor would not trust

190

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

ordinary sensation to determine the severity of the wound but would take measurements, such as blood pressure and pulse to use the symbols as indicators of changes in the working systems of the body, i.e. the circulation system and the functioning of various organs. This knowledge is beyond that of the primitive and also that of ordinary empirical knowledge which the modern mind relies on in everyday life as would any scientist but which nevertheless is less precise than the scientific and has less ability to understand and control nature to achieve human ends—in this case to save a life. Sometimes the scientific knowledge would even seem to run counter to common sense, as when a wounded person goes into shock and requires a blanket even though it is not a cold day outside. With the definition of the dialectical development Cassirer completes his definition of myth as a symbolic form. The relationship of myth to other forms causes him to develop a new idea about myth that is as fundamental as that of symbolic form. This second stage in the theory of myth is discussed in the following chapter.

CHAPTER 7

Myth Has a Permanent Power A Universal Function of Human Activity "Every form through which consciousness passes seems to belong in some way to its enduring heritage. The surpassing of a particular form is made possible not by the vanishing, the total destruction, of this form but by its preservation within the continuity of consciousness as a whole... "(PSF III, 78). Cassirer's definition of myth as a symbolic form is contained in Mythical Thought, the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and this is the first stage of his theory. This is not his entire theory of myth, however.1 Although it seems to be his entire account of myth as a distinctive kind of experience, within this experience and beyond it in other worldviews there is a universal aspect of the mind. It is characteristic of myth to develop this power that still endures today in modern thought. The discussion of this power is the second stage of his theory of myth, for it allows Cassirer to solve an important problem concerning the role of myth in the whole of human civilization. In this chapter the new idea of the universal power of myth is discussed as an important stage in his theory. DOES SCIENCE ECLIPSE MYTH? The Development of Science beyond Myth Throughout history, science has replaced superstition and pseudo-sciences: Astronomy replaces Astrology, Chemistry replace Alchemy, Psychology replaces Phrenology (reading the character from the shape of the skull). Some activities of the mythical world can be called proto-science. While they did not involve experiments, they did involve observation and attempts at relating phenomena and causal reasoning, such as in Egyptian astronomy and ancient Greek medicine. Cassirer does not think that the intention of the mythical thinkers was scientific in the sense used 191

192

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

today. He thinks that the modern mind can read back into myth and anachronistically interpret learning about the physical universe as a scientific purpose, whereas the mythical purposes were religious or unique to myth. These proto-scientific activities lead to other ones in subsequent cultures and the modern mind can retrospectively find a continuity in a universal tradition of science even though the previous cultures may not have regarded it in this way. The mythical worldview gives way to the empirical worldview and it in turn gives way to the scientific. Cassirer does not regard these as historical changes in the sense that dates correspond to these changes. Instead, they are changes in the type of thinking that occurred in different places and at different times, though over a long period of time. Within cultures, some portions of the population would still be dominated by otherwise outdated modes of thinking. If, however, I were to correspond the change to the empirical worldview, I would say that cultures do not become fairly dominated by an empirical attitude until the rise of empirical science after Galileo and Bacon. The scientific attitude of today exists side by side with the empirical attitude which is used in everyday matters. On Cassirer's view, science is a mental activity occupying only a phase of people's lives and using ideal constants and formulas but people live in a world with tables and chairs. The aim of Cassirer's entire philosophy should be called to mind in this discussion of the relation between myth and science. He aims to create an ideal system of knowledge that is divided into cultural areas changing through history. His studies in myth lead him to define it as the lowest type of human experience and his studies in science lead him to define it as the highest. In human culture myth appeared first; science, last. If one is creating an ideal system of knowledge, the first type will be generalized into a definition of the lowest level possible and the last type will be generalized into the highest level ever attainable. The whole of culture seems to aim toward science: it is "the highest and most characteristic attainment of human culture" EM 207). If there is to be any real change from the beginning of culture to the end, science must have left myth far behind. They are "two absolutely independent and unique forms" (PSF II, 254). "Our insight," Cassirer explains, "into the development of science— taken in the ideal, not temporal sense—is complete only if it shows how science arose in and worked itself out of the sphere of mythical immediacy and explains the direction and law of this movement" (PSF II, xvi). The general direction of the change from myth to science is to eliminate

Myth Has a Permanent Power

193

the anthropomorphic, physiognomic, expressive traits of mythical symbols. "In the words of Bacon, science strives to conceive the world 'ex analogia universi', not 'ex analogia hominis' " (EM 228). In other words science tries to eliminate the merely personal limitations on knowledge in order to make it universal and valid. The Extreme Difference between Science and Myth Is a Crisis in Cassirer's Theory In Cassirer's philosophy science develops so far beyond myth that there seems to be no more relation between them. The mental processes of myth seem not only not to have a role but are excluded from science. In Cassirer's words, . . . scientific concept formation, even in its earliest stage, has surpassed the world of expression [myth]. Even when approached by the most rudimentary methods, the mere problem of a natural science implies a conscious detachment from the world of expression. Nature, as an object of knowledge, of thought and inquiry, is given to man only when he has learned to draw a dividing line between it and his own world of subjective feeling. Nature is enduring and uniform recurrence, detached from the stream of experience and set over against it as a content in itself. But at first the departure from the sphere of subjective affectivity leaves the sphere of immediate sensation intact. The subject seem unable to break away from the sphere of sensation without losing all contact with reality. . . . But though the world of ideas, of meanings, relinquishes all similarity to the empirical, sensuous world, it cannot dispense with all relation to it (PSF III, 452).

Science tries to eliminate all subjective factors from the empirical data to which theories refer. The ordinary empirical worldview is subjective by comparison to science. Sensory qualities such as hard and soft, cool and warm are not the data of science until they become quantified or otherwise symbolized so as to become homogeneous units in a series of phenomena for which there can be universal laws. Science does not use "raw" empirical data; increasingly the only data it uses has already been gathered through instruments, meters, and devices. These have replaced human eyes, ears, nose, and touch. The empirical worldview is objective in comparison to myth. It is able to think of things in the world independently from the personal

194

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

perspective of a viewer. For example, as has been cited in this study, primitives cannot draw or use a map. They cannot because their ideas of space and time are not general and impersonal enough for them to form any relations apart from the position of their body in some place at this moment or a memory of such a situation. All spatial ideas refer to the human body. These comparisons of myth to common sense to science show that science seems to have excluded myth. If myth is to have its distinctive character and science is to have its, then it seems they must be mutually exclusive, at opposite ends of the spectrum of an ideal system of knowledge. Cassirer regards it as a crisis for his philosophy: This dividing line [between myth and science] leads to an irrevocable separation, to an authentic and definitive crisis of consciousness. The worldviews of myth and of theoretical knowledge cannot coexist in the same area of thought. They are mutually exclusive: the beginning of one is equivalent to the end of the other. Once the day has dawned, once the theoretical consciousness and theoretical perception are born, no return seems possible to the world of mythical shadows. For what can such a return be but a regression into a primitive stage that has already been transcended? (PSF III, 78).

If one thinks historically, one would wonder why it is such a crisis to say that myth is past and gone. From Cassirer's philosophical perspective, the hiatus in human knowledge brought about by the exclusion of myth from science is a major logical error and breakdown in his philosophy. The crisis is epistemologica!. It occurs because Cassirer first assumes that any symbolic form constructs a permanent aspect of reality. If a symbolic form is understood as not having a role in a culture, i.e. if myth is seen to have been a complete mistake or to be completely lacking, then it could not have been a symbolic form or the assumption of the permanent status of the symbolic forms is wrong. Cassirer faces a major contradiction in his theory. Either his first major assumption is wrong or the subsequent conclusions about myth and science are. There are many passages that show Cassirer uses his original assumption (a symbolic form is universal). He uses phrases such as "certain unchanging fundamental forms" and "self-contained and enduring unity of form" (PSF I, 89). He even states that there are no actual human cultures without religion (PSF II, 193), and when this statement is com-

Myth Has a Permanent Power

195

bined with others it seems to imply that there are none without myth, not even the cultures of today that are highly influenced by science, though perhaps it is not the only perspective operating through the entire populations at all times. In more precise statements Cassirer claims that any symbolic form creates only "an aspect of reality" and so it could remain in societies today while still being excluded from science proper: "None of these forms can simply be reduced to, or derived from, the others; each of them designates a particular approach, in which and through which it constitutes its own aspect of 'reality' " (PSF I, 78). In other passages he makes clear that the various symbolic forms complement one another and coexist in any actual culture: "These [cultural forms] cannot be reduced to a common denominator. They tend in different directions and obey different principles. But this multiplicity and disparateness does not denote discord or disharmony. All these functions complete and complement one another" (EM 228). MYTH CREATES A UNIVERSAL FUNCTION O F HUMAN ACTIVITY Cassirer solves the problem of the permanence of myth despite the development of science in the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Phenomenology of Knowledge. This volume defines the symbolic form of science just as Volume One defines language and Volume Two defines myth. The third volume is described as the "apogee" of the system of knowledge which places science as the counterpoint of myth at the beginning.2 The solution is regarded by scholars as a fundamental concept in Cassirer's philosophy in addition to the concept of symbolic form.3 The solution requires some unity of myth and science that is of a higher order or more general than the idea of a symbolic form. "Thus the specific difference between them [between the symbolic forms] does not preclude membership in a common genus" (PSF III, 48). In the discussion of the mythical dialectic it was mentioned that the potentiality for the type of mind active in religion has to be present in the mythical mind if it is to be able to develop in the right direction. Generally, Cassirer believes that later worldviews are the fulfillment of some potentialities in earlier ones and equally true the later phases retain some reference to the earlier ones, for example, by transforming their symbols into ones with entirely different purposes (PSF III, 448). The fact that myth or any symbolic form can be surpassed by another requires that there be a continuity

196

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

of interlocking worldviews. If not, there could be no understanding of bygone ages and the philosopher or anyone else could not understand anything about the previous way of thinking. This difficulty would be even harder than the attempt to understand how animals perceive, which is very difficult because the human process interferes by making the animal a dumb human, by relating the animal action to the human type whereas the comparison places the action in a system of reference not possible for the animal; no type of reference outside its sphere of action is possible, though humans can hypothesize about what is outside their experience. How can we imagine a "world" without images? It is a little like saying we would try to see in a room without any light. The human beings, though, put on their infrared lenses of their imagination to see into the imaginative darkness of the animals. Then Cassirer posits a principle of his philosophy as important as the concept of symbolic form, because it saves the idea from becoming contradicted by the extreme difference between myth and science; the new idea rescues the genus of symbolic form from being split into different types or from being no longer universal. Cassirer argues to an assumption he must make to save his ideas up to this point (what the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood would call an "absolute presupposition" or necessary assumption): . . . we shall not be able to believe that even so strange and paradoxical a structure as mythical perception is totally lost or superfluous within the general view of reality which the theoretical consciousness projects. It is to be expected that the basic tendency that plainly dominates this perception will not be absolutely extinguished, however much it is crowded out and modified by other modes of seeing. The submerging of the contents of the mythical consciousness does not signify the end of the spiritual function in which they originated. None of the mythical pictures need be salvaged in the reality of experience and in the realm of its objects—nevertheless it can be shown that the spiritual potency, whose first concrete manifestation was myth, asserts itself in a certain respect, and that within the new dimension of theoretical self-consciousness it survives and continues to act in new form, in a kind of metamorphosis (PSF III, 78-79).

Therefore, myth remains in science—not its entire view of the world, nor even its symbols, but only its "spiritual function" and then it does only in a changed form.

Myth Has a Permanent Power

197

In the same passage Cassirer defines the function especially associated with myth as "the expressive function" ["this universal principle, this a priori, of myth" (PSF III, 75)]. Many times in this present study the expressive character of mythical symbols has been discussed. The universal function is the general ability making expressive symbols possible in myth and also some expressive aspects of post-mythical experience. The main type of this expressive experience is the immediate perception of human feelings and other subjects. Many theories, he points out, have tried to explain the human perception of other minds by a kind of inference in the way that phenomenologists of the first part of the twentieth century tried to explain intersubjectivity. Cassirer claims that the recognition of other minds and feelings is not a mediated inference but an immediate recognition—an expressive aspect of perception continuing beyond the mythical worldview. The status of the universal expressive function needs to be defined more specifically. Cassirer regards the function of expression as a presupposition of the evolution of science from myth. As a concept of an order higher than or different from the idea of a symbolic form, expression cannot be defined only in terms of mythical experience. The meaning of expression could only be defined in terms of other types of experience as well. The example of the recognition of emotions and other minds in the life of the scientist—not in his/her theory—is an example of Cassirer's. Although Cassirer does not give examples in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, the areas of the humanities, the arts, and psychology could provide ones. In contrast to the idea of symbolic form, a universal function is more dynamic. He calls it a "living, dynamic function," "an energy" instead of a product, and both a "form-creating" and a "form-breaking power," which would be understood according to what it does (Schilpp, 878-79). Before giving empirical examples, it is best to define expression in more general terms than qualities of human feeling such as the frightening or the attractive, the kind, the funny, and so on. Animals seem to express sadness and other emotions though they are reactions and are not of the same type as the human correlatives, according to Cassirer. The human expressions need not have anything to do with the immediate environment and though they usually do they can represent large complexes of related ideas, whereas the animal "emotions" are only specific embedded organic reactions not representative of larger complexes and not merely designated for others to consider. Humans can show an emotion without actually feeling it in a particular situation and this gesturing

198

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

conveys a complex of ideas greater than could be in the immediate situation. In Language and Myth Cassirer writes about the capacity of the primitive to express as the ability to "distill" an entire experience into a point, an image, a symbolized feeling, and to be able to consider this experience again upon seeing or hearing this image, as others can (LM 90-91). In this sense expression is an act of presentation, as Cassirer often claims. It is his view that perception can only be human when the physical things are treated as symbols—when the human can regard the physical things as a record of the feelings or even of the total situation of the person at that moment. Cassirer believes there are no human thoughts without the mediation of symbols, even if the representation is muscular feeling and emotions during dreams which could be drawn or discussed when awake. He claims, "the inner image acquires its content only by composing itself into a work and so manifesting itself (PSF III, 39). Human thoughts must be expressed, must be presented. Mythical expression is only a specific mode of the presentation of thoughts to oneself and to others. To make it more clear, I could point out that it follows from this idea of Cassirer's that no human thought is incommunicable and that every one would have to be capable of being presented through symbols conveyed by the human senses. One other important meaning of the universal function of expression should be mentioned. In Cassirer's first original publication of a new theory of concepts in 1910, Substance and Function, he defines a function as the rule that makes possible the development of a series. In other words, functions do not just state already acquired knowledge but are means of acquiring new knowledge. In the case of the primitive, the forming of expressive symbols is a way of creating a larger and more articulate view of the world while developing the mind. The Presence of Myth in Symbolic Forms Developed from It As an abstract and still preliminary explanation, myth remains in more highly developed cultural forms as a presupposed power of expression and presentation of thought. Cassirer does state three other ways in which not just the function but the form of myth continues to structure experience. First of all, the form of myth remains in a subordinate and partial role within an actual culture. Cassirer mentioned the fact that the replacement of Astrology by Astronomy did not totally eliminate the old

Myth Has a Permanent Power

199

ways of thinking; rather, they remained as folk beliefs among the less educated portions of the populations.4 And Astrology has survived even today, though many times it is a game, not a belief. Cassirer claims science and other forms have "strata" within myth, though they are dominated by its principles and he implies that myth also remains as a stratum in more developed types of cultural form (PSF II, 69). Another way in which the form of myth endures despite the development of more advanced worldviews is through the mixture, the coexistence in various degrees of all the forms (PSF II, 196). Cassirer mentions this possibility in passing though he does not develop the idea as a specific doctrine. Especially after the mythical worldview, which seems to be a total world for a human, there arise different symbolic perspectives on the world which are not complete in themselves so as to make up the whole of life. For example, art is a symbolic form and anything could become represented through art; however, this is only one dimension of experience, for not all experiences are art, even though at one time all experiences were primitive. New abilities developed in civilization. When different symbolic forms exist in an actual culture Cassirer offers the suggestion that the development of the whole culture may occur through the simultaneous development of different aspects of it; in other words, he cites the example of poetry developing independently but at the same time as myth (PSF II, 196). He leaves open the possibility that some cultural works may be influenced by more than one form (PSF III, 449). And he claims that the forms may act in concert to produce some total events in cultures, especially those beyond the matrix of all culture, myth (PSF II, 14). As a third way, the form of myth survives through palingenesis. This idea is first stated in Language and Myth (98). This reincarnation of myth allows language to enrich itself with metaphorical meanings. And in the same passage Cassirer claims that myth also rejuvenates art. Precisely how this occurs is not explained. I can explain this idea further by reference to other passages. First, the palingenesis of myth in religion makes it richer. According to Cassirer, religion forms its symbols by negating the ones of myth (PSF II, 244). What is more, even the new religious symbols contain an unconscious feeling element left over from the mythical consciousness; thus, the old way of thinking persists in the unconscious of the new way of thinking, as past human experiences do in present ones (Ibid.). Besides the constant or recurring enrichment of language by the palingenesis of myth in language, there is the remainder of myth in

200

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

language in the form of emotion through connotations. Words have their emotive values (PSF III, 449). And, metaphor is built into the structure of natural languages (SMC 176). Both of these traits of language, present even in modern times are—if not vestigial examples of the power of myth—examples of the currently needed power of myth to vivify experience and give it its "anchor" in bodily, biological experience.5 The power of myth remains in subsequent cultural activities of a higher level as an essential aspect of the perceptual process. The third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms discusses at length the unique connection of myth with perception. It can be said of his view that myth relies more on perception than do more advanced ways of knowing and that myth first develops abilities used in perception that are always required. These abilities are more fundamental to human experience than even the structural differences of the symbolic forms. According to Cassirer, all perception requires that human feeling create a type of divisions through the senses that give all specific physical things their particular character; in myth, the type is sometimes called the opposition of the sacred and the profane, although he does speak of it in even more general terms at times. This opposition is part of the meaning of any thing in the mythical worldview, and it is at the same time a mirror of the mind's process. This contribution of myth to more advanced levels of perception is stated in the following passage: If we examine the peculiarity of mythical space and compare it with the space of sensory intuition and the logical space of mathematics, we can follow these stages of orientation down to a still deeper spiritual level; and we can clearly discern the point of transition at which an opposition intrinsically rooted in mythical feeling begins to shape itself, to take on an objective form, through which the general porcess of objectivization, the intuitive-objective apprehension and interpretation of the world of sense impressions assumes a new direction (PSF II, 93-94).

It is clear from this passage that Cassirer believes a function in mythical perception continues in postmythical perception—perhaps other functions eventually supplement the mythical one to change the character of perception, yet it remains.

Myth Has a Permanent Power

201

HOW "MYTH" REMAINS IN SCIENCE One way that has just been mentioned is palingenesis. This is the most interesting and fruitful way in which myth could persist throughout the history of science even up to modern times. Cassirer believes that when science is starting a new way of thinking it uses mythical, myth-like," or metaphorical ideas. Science long preserves a primordial mythical heritage, to which it merely gives another form. For the natural sciences it suffices here to recall the centuries-long and still inconclusive struggle to free the concept of force from all mythical components, to transform it into a pure concept of function. And here we are speaking not merely of the continuous struggle attending our efforts to define the content of certain basic concepts but of a conflict that reaches deep down into the very form of theoretical knowledge. That no sharp boundary has been drawn between myth and logos is best shown by the recent reappearance of myth in the realm of pure methodology (PSF II, xvii). Here Cassirer is claiming that the form of science throughout its history is affected by the form of myth. An example in another passage is that of phlogiston (PSF II, 67). This was originally a substance that was thought to be present during combustion. The progress of science dispelled the idea by understanding the process as a sequence of changes. The idea that a substance was present is a mythical idea of Alchemy, for whenever relations are present myth posits some kind of identity in the form of a thing or spirit. The scientific reform of its own mythical beginnings involved the following change of attitude: [In Alchemy] Every particular property that matter possesses, every form it can assume, every efficacy it can exert is hypostatized into a special substance, an independent being. Modern science, and particularly modern chemistry in the form given it by Lavoisier, succeeded in overcoming this semimythical alchemic concept of the attribute only by fundamentally reforming the whole question. For modern science the 'attribute' is not simple but highly complex; not original and elementary but derived; not absolute but thoroughly relative. What, according to a sensationalist view, one calls an attribute of things and seeks to apprehend and understand immediately as such is interpreted by critical analysis as a determinate mode of efficacy, a specific

202

Cassirer and Langer on Myth reaction, which, however arises only under very definite conditions. Thus the inflammability of a body no longer implies the presence of a specific substance, phlogiston, in it, but signifies its reaction to oxygen;

while the solubility of a body signifies its reaction to water or an acid, etc. The particular quality appears no longer as a substance but as something thoroughly contingent which, under causal analysis, dissolves into a mesh of relations. And from this it follows obversely that until this form of logical analysis is developed, 'thing' and 'attribute' cannot be sharply differentiated; the categorical spheres of the two concepts must inevitably move together and ultimately merge (PSF II, 67). This example suggests that new phases of science, new periods, begin with semimythical notions which lead to more scientific ones. Another example I could give is the "ether"—the postulation of a substance extending through the entire universe to save the laws of motion of classical mechanics before relativity. In addition to palingenesis, the power of expression, first instituted by myth, is necessary in the perception of scientists. It has already been mentioned that scientists need the function of expression in order to experience other people as subjects or to understand aspects of their characters in immediate acts of perception. Cassirer goes a step further. He even claims that expression is needed in the totalization of sense data into some kind of unity that the scientist can refashion.6 Myth is also present in science as a new awareness of the self (PSF III, 57). He does claim that science must ultimately have some kind of anchor in human feeling, in felt distinctions (PSF II, 93). I do not think he means these need be felt in the same way that the mythical consciousness feels them. I think he means that in the mind and life of the scientist, there are many more intermediary steps between the highest conceptions and the activity of everyday life. There are many more words in modern life, many more symbols and ideas than there were in primitive life. Nevertheless, the condition of meaning is that there be some connection whether an individual scientist is consciously aware of it or not. The final way in which "myth" remains in science is through the similarity in the operation of the categories in both. I think the similarity generally consists in the fact that both tend toward unity, tend to represent the unity of all conceptions through a particular content, but do this in different ways. Cassirer claims that the mere fact of causal relations in myth and science makes them comparable (PSF II, 48). He goes a step further

Myth Has a Permanent Power

203

when he states that the mythical formation of space resembles the scientific (PSF II, 85). Another passage can help to elucidate the meaning of this bold claim. He claims that in myth, "The distant merges with what is close at hand, since the one can in some way be copied in the other" (PSF II, 91). The example of the universe's regions being defined according to the limbs of the human body comes to mind. With regard to science, Cassirer claims it "has never fully overcome it [this view of the macrocosm in the microcosm]." Other passages suggest that the scientific tendency toward wholeness is like but superior to the mythical tendency (PSF II, 85). This attitude of Cassirer is like the common attitude today that modern scientific notions resemble in a general way the first mythical ones. For example, space is thought to be curved after The Theory of Relativity but this notion resembles in a general way some attitudes of primitives to give shape or physical characteristics to abstract ideas; of course, the science of today is of a much higher systematic level than notions in ancient Egypt. Also, R.G. Collingwood in The Idea of Nature makes such comparisons of modern science and myth, claiming that time, for example, is now thought to be cyclical as it was for the primitive mind, albeit cyclical with a far greater determinacy and in a quite different way. The point is that modern science is not mythical; however, its tendency toward unity has in it an echo of the mythical, which fact suggests the continuityof the moderns with the ancients and the unity of human civilization. NOTES 1

A leading scholar on Cassirer and Vico, Verene states that the theory of myth is completely contained in PSF II and serves as the basis of the theory of the universal function in PSF III ("Cassirer's View of Myth and Symbol," 559). I agree that the theory of myth as a symbolic form can be said to be contained in PSF II, but the idea of symbolic form does not totally explain what myth means in human civilization. There is more to be said. I think the apparent difference in opinion is merely a difference in the terms used for the immediate context. 2 This idea occurs in Franz Elieser Meyer's Ernst Cassirer. (Deutschjüdisches Gespräch, ed. H. Loebel.) Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1969. Cited on page 159 of Eggers' and Mayer's bibliography. 3 Verene, "Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms," 120. 4 See PSF ii, 244 where Cassirer states that the former demonic powers of myth remain in religious consciousness on a subconscious level.

204

Cassirer and Langer on Myth See PSF III, 449, where Cassirer states that art and language need myth to enrich them with new feeling. Also see SMC 176, where Cassirer states that no matter how developed the language it still uses metaphor and expresses emotion as an aspect of its meaning. 6 Cassirer writes, "They [the simple ideas of sensation] consist not in the elements' of sensation but in original and immediate characters of expression. Concrete perception does not wholly detach itself from these characters even where it resolutely and consciously takes the road of pure objectivization. It never dissoves into a mere complex of sensuous qualities—such as light or dark, cold or warm—but is always attuned to a specific expressive tone: it is never directed exclusively toward the 'what' of the object but encompasses the mode of its total manifestation—the character of the luring or menacing, the familiar or uncanny, the soothing or frightening, which lies in this phenomenon purely as such and independently of its objective interpretation" (PSF III, 67).

5

CHAPTER 8

Myth Recurs and Progresses Toward an Ideal Limit of Knowledge "Philosophy cannot be content with analyzing the individual forms of human culture. It seeks a

universal synthetic view which includes all individual forms. But is not such an all-embracing view an impossible task, a mere chimera?" (EM 70).

This chapter discusses the third and final stage of Cassirer's theory of myth before he applies it to modern political life in his posthumously published book, The Myth of the State. It constitutes a third stage because it develops from the second and explains the role of myth in cultures that are not predominantly primitive. This explanation applies to all such cultures, even future ones, in Cassirer's ideal system of knowledge. A theory in science means a system of ideas with a general enough vision to predict some future results. Cassirer's theory of myth applies to future cultures as well. THE PROBLEM OF THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE UNIVERSAL FUNCTION OF MYTH AND THAT OF SCIENCE Myth Defined through Three Universal Functions of Activity Through myth the universal function of activity called expression develops. It is dominant in that first worldview of humanity. Cassirer was forced to presuppose it in order to explain the continuity of knowledge from myth to science. The function explains how types of thinking higher than myth still need some ability first developed in myth combined with new abilities mostly formed after myth. In this way something of the past is still needed and something of the present is added. Cassirer believes the continuity of human nature, what he often calls the spirit, requires the interlocking of phases. An analogy could be the way past childhood experiences remain active but unnoticed in the attitudes 205

206

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

of adults. One way in which Cassirer speaks of myth remaining in all cultures is as a repressed but active stratum below the surface, so to speak, of the dominant symbolism (PSF II, 93/94). As such, myth could never be eliminated in any future culture. Another way to regard expression is to see it as a generalization of the law of mythical thought, that of the fusion or the concrescence of members of a series. Then the function of expression does not mean that the postmythical mind makes mythical symbols but that it still must create contents that depend for their meaning on the presentation of the unanalyzable bond between human feeling and external stimuli. The presentation of an individual content to a mind always has a feeling component, according to Cassirer, or else the content could not mean anything and could not even be formed. Even in the most abstract theories of science the ideas are like the top of a pyramid: they are built on less general ideas and those on less general ones until they are on the level of everyday life and then the pyramids go even below the earth, as ideas have their lower strata of definition in past experience. This past experience is the fund of expressive knowledge first developed in the childhood of people in modern societies and in the first human civilizations. Cassirer thinks of expression as this primordial heritage of past experience that presents the first contents of mind by preconsciously forming a bond of outer stimuli and human feeling (PSF II, 93-94). Human reality always has some feeling on which it is based and made relevant to other aspects of life. As myth contributes the function of expression or presentation, other forms are also correlated with additional universal functions that they contribute. They should at least be defined briefly, abstract as they are, because they are said to be nascently present in the mythical worldview, albeit very undeveloped. Furthermore, the role of these functions in myth and all the other worldviews leads Cassirer to the third major conclusion about myth, which is the subject of this chapter. (The first conclusion is that myth is a symbolic form, the second is that myth creates a universal function of expression/presentation, and the third is that "myth" recurs as an integral component in more advanced ways of thinking as civilization advances.) Besides expression, the other two universal functions in any worldview are called "representation" and "signification." These three are the main topic of the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The function of representation can be thought of as a generalization of the type of concept developed through language to form the ordinary em-

Myth Recurs and Progresses

207

pirical worldview, which replaces the mythical. The function of signification can be thought of as a generalization of the type of concept developed through science to form the domain of ideal meaning in its theories, which is a higher order knowledge in relationship to the ordinary empirical world of things. Since the present purpose is to understand myth, I will only define each function before discussing the implications of their relationships for the understanding of myth in postmythical cultures. Expression also means presentation, and "representation" means to be able to present again or find again a content of consciousness. I can explain Cassirer's idea as an ability that solves some of the contradictions and incoherencies in mythical thought. There is the example of an Indian being shot with an arrow, removing it, and then putting an ointment on the arrow as some kind of remedy for the wound. The merely felt association of the arrow and the wound becomes the hypostatization of the essence of an enemy in both the arrow and the wound. Can an enemy be in two places at one time? The mythical mind is unable to understand this problem. A more coherent view of the situation is to regard the arrow as a different thing from the wound. The arrow changed the body so that the wound occurred, but there is not a new substance in the body—an enemy spirit. The Indian cannot understand that the human body is the same thing but is modified in one respect. If the Indian were able to form fixed spatial-temporal associations of qualities, or things with attributes, then the unity of the arrow could be understood as distinct from the unity of the body with its wound. Another way to state the ability to find a content again is to say that the unity of the human body can be thought again despite the change in one of its attributes, namely, the wound. For the primitive a change in a part causes him/her to think of an entirely new substance (the enemy there). The objects that primitives think are not so internally complex that the unity can be found again despite changes in some of its parts. A similar example is the inability of a primitive to use or draw a map. To use one requires the ability to choose a fixed spatial center of attention on the map and relate some features (street names) to this center and then be able to choose a different center and to relate features (different street names) to it. The fixed spatial center of attention is like the unity of a thing and the features related to it are like theattributes of a body—the color of the skin and so on. The primitive lacks the ability to create the relatively abstract unities needed to organize the sensory data. Representation or finding again means creating these unities for sensory stimuli and finding them again through various stimuli. The unity of the body can be understood again even through the

208

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

wound, and so the wound is a change in the body and should be medically treated. The third and last universal function is "signification," meaning the defining of the object of knowledge through a system of reference and the ability to represent the system in one content of a higher order.1 No longer is the object of science, Cassirer claims, a thing with attributes— the blood from the arrow wound of the Indian. The problem with this ordinary empirical view is that the unity of the blood is only sensuously known by the color red and the spatial and temporal coexistence of its warmth, its redness, and its movement. On the contrary, if the unity of the object of knowledge is known more explicitly, than the real blood can be understood more deeply and can be related to other parts of the body and to other materials so as to help the Indian. The object of the scientist is composed of unseen parts that are related by scientific laws into a much more determinate (informative, precise) and universalizable object. The blood then is composed of microscopic biological components which in turn are composed of chemicals, which in turn are composed of atoms, and so on. The scientist does not see the parts of the object with the naked eye but reads them from instruments and measurements of units of sense data. He relates these parts into a much more informative object than the one known merely by the eyes and senses. The scientist has a greater capacity to relate the biological idea of the blood to the unseen biological idea of bacteria or poison on the arrow which may enter the blood stream. Clearly, the scientific approach of unerstanding an object that has a position in a universal system is different from understanding a thing that is only sensuously intuited and has a relatively loose and vague association with other objects. Scientific knowledge is superior to ordinary empirical knowledge and the latter is superior to the mythical. Ironically, the scientific object resembles the mythical in the sense that both, in contrast to empirical knowledge, understand the unity of a physical object as something not visible but effective in visible things. In both the object has a more imagined unity than a sensed one. The Significative Function of Science May Not Need the Expressive Function of Myth The problem of the relationship between myth and science is solved by introducing the new assumption of a set of three universal functions, which are more general than the particular cultural activities. Now, the same type of problem seems to occur at a more general level of concepts.

Myth Recurs and Progresses

209

As science threatened to exclude myth entirely and so cause a discontinuity in Cassirer's theory of knowledge, he thinks that the significative function may exclude expression. The symbols of science "have cast off everything that is merely expressive or for that matter intuitive" (PSF III, 285). Science surpasses the level of empirical knowledge, which surpassed myth, by eliminating the expressive and merely subjective aspects of language. To divest speech of this 'feeling tone' [of any particular language] would be to destroy its heartbeat and breath. And yet there is a stage in the development of the human spirit, at which this very sacrifice is demanded of it. The spirit must progress to a pure apprehension of the world, in which all particularities resulting from consideration of the apprehending subject are effaced. . . . And it is this transition that opens up the realm of genuine, strict 'science'. In its symbolic signs and concepts everything which possessed any sort of mere expressive value is extinguished. Here it it no longer any individual subject, but only the thing itself that speaks. On the one hand this seems to signify a monstrous impoverishment: for the movement of language now seems to have been stopped, its inner form seems to have frozen into a mere formula. But what this formula lacks in closeness to life and individual fullness it makes up for by its universal scope and validity. In this universality national as well as individual differences are annulled (PSF III, 339).

This development of science from the ordinary empirical view of the world parallels the development of this worldview and those of religion and art from myth (340). Science "de-materializes" and "detaches" its symbols further from the world than language could. Cassirer argues that in any particular language there is a 'subjective world view' limiting the understanding of the empirical world through it, but that science is not restricted to a particular culture (PSF III, 341). He defined this "subjective world view" very thoroughly in volume one of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms on language and the empirical worldview. Then, in two major stages the characteristic features of symbols developed by myth have been excluded from new types of symbols. The symbols of science are consciously created and "artificial" in a way beyond the sentences of language and the images of myth. The images and symbols of myth are always imbued with subjective feeling and are to

210

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

this extent less universal and less valid than the more objective symbols of the ordinary empirical worldview. As Cassirer maintains, these empirical objects are particular and limited to the perspective of a perceiving subject whereas science can overcome the relativism in ordinary sense perception (400). This does not mean, in Cassirer's view, that scientific concepts are not valid through correspondence to real physical things, but only that there is no one-to-one correspondence of a scientific concept to a thing, as there tends to be in language of a word to a physical thing (464). The whole system of a scientific theory does correspond to the whole of the physical world so that some predictions can be made. The detachment of science from the empirical world, and hence from the relativism of a particular perceiving subject, can be clearly seen in the use of ideal limiting concepts, which are the substitutes for the actual physical things that ordinary common sense judgments are made on. As he explains [Karll Pearson in The Grammar of Science], it is never the contents of perceptions as such that we can use as foundations for the judgments of pure mechanics, as points of application in the expression of the laws of motion. Rather, all these laws can only be asserted with meaning of the ideal limiting structures which we conceptually substitute for the empirical data of sense-perception. Motion is a predicate that is never immediately applicable to the 'things' of the surrounding sense-world, but holds solely of that other class of objects, which the mathematician substitutes for them in his free construction. Motion is not a fact of sensation, but of thought; not of 'perception' but of 'conception'. . . . Groups of sensuous impressions can change, can lose old parts and gain new, can form into new groups; but these changes in no way signify the real object of mechanics (SF 121).

This passage shows Cassirer's claim that the "objects" of science are not the physical objects of daily life but are "ideal objects," which are more universal than the actual ones. Cassirer speaks of science as having made a "final break with existence and its immediacy" (PSF III, 284). In this passage he declares that the universal functions of expression (correlated with myth) and of representation (correlated with language and the empirical worldview) "spring from" the function that is correlated with science, namely, the significative function. In less technical terms, this means that in myth and the common sense world the symbols have their meaning through a "system," though not in the same way that symbols do in science. This

Myth Recurs and Progresses

211

placing of a symbol in a group of them is a requirement for having a worldview, and Cassirer believes that it is most characteristic, most developed in science, because it defines its symbols more through a system of knowledge than through separate direct acts of relating concepts to physical things. Therefore, in many passages Cassirer suggests that the universal function characteristic of science almost seems to operate without the expressive (or "presentative") function of images that is characteristic of myth. On the one hand, he knows, however, that in order not to repeat the problem of the permanence of myth despite the development of science, the universal function of science does not actually operate in real life without some cooperation from the expressive function. On the other hand, he also knows that the expressive function must operate differently in science than it does in myth.2 The two requirements of being universal and of being capable of development seem to run counter to one another. It is almost like trying to make something admit of a difference in degree when it cannot; a rough analogy is the question, can someone be more dead than someone else? more alive? Cassirer needs to explain how a difference, a development, can occur in what he called universal functions of human behavior "independent of any particular aim and object of action" (PSF II, 208). If the functions can become somewhat different, will they become so different that some will be lost or changed so as to no longer fit the previous definitions? Could new functions develop as new symbolic forms seemed to come into their own (although they were implicit in an embryonic stage)? THE SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE FUNCTIONS: THE IDEAL LIMIT The problem of the development of the functions can be restated in this way. On the one hand, science seems to develop so much that its function of signification no longer needs expression, first developed by myth. On the other hand, science must continue to develop ever more universal theories, as this is the characteristic of the significative function, to place a symbol into an all-inclusive system of symbols (a worldview) (PSF III, 476). In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Cassirer postulates the ideal limit as a solution to a problem of scientific symbolism. When explaining the continuity of scientific symbolism, Cassirer discovers a problem: "physics [like science in general] gains this unity and extension by

212

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

advancing toward ever more universal symbols. But in this process it cannot jump over its own shadow. It can and must strive to replace particular concepts and signs with absolutely universal ones. But it can never dispense with the function of concepts and signs as such: this would demand an intellectual representation of the world without the basic instruments of representation" (PSF III, 478-79). The philosopher is denying that science can "jump over its own shadow," and he uses this metaphor to illustrate the act of mind when "reaching out beyond itself to put itself in relation to an object (318). If the act were possible, mind would succeed "in leaving given matter behind it and in representing the transcendent" by means of symbols (382). The passage raises a problem of scientific symbolism, one of explaining science as a continuous development in which scientists cannot symbolize a transcendent, an "absolutely universal" concept. Cassirer indicates the need to limit the structure of scientific thought. A basic difference between science and the other symbolic forms reveals the difficulty Cassirer has of defining the limit. The most discussed symbolic forms are science, language, and myth. Myth is a particular image-world whose symbols have a metaphorical or an expressive quality, and, as the mythic world develops, they acquire an analogical nature.3 Contrary to common usage, "language" for Cassirer does not signify a means of communication but an image-world whose symbols have an analogical or a representative nature. When a person rejects analogical symbols in favor of systematic ones like those in pure mathematics, he has attained the scientific image-world whose symbols become increasingly systematic. Generally, every symbolic form has a polarity within it, such as the dialectical movement in science.4 In particular, when speaking about the symbolic form of religion, one resembling myth, he states that the opposition within religion appears "to be in a sense appeased, if not negated" when religious thinking develops and becomes artistic expression (PSF II, 260-261). A person having the religious mode of experience cannot resolve the dialectical tension. And since all symbolic forms have inner polarity, it seems likely that each one will refer to a different form in which the conflict becomes "appeased." One of them does not. Even though religion, myth, and language have within themselves the source of movement to a more developed form of experience, science cannot lead to a new one; it cannot jump over its own shadow; and no symbolic activity can achieve what science fails to do.5 As a result, the idea aim of science differs greatly from the goal of language and that of myth. Science has a limit that is insurmount-

Myth Recurs and Progresses

213

able by any kind of symbolic formation. The restriction on it applies to all symbolic forms, not just to one, as the ultimate aim of language and that of myth do. Yet, like the other forms, science has an inner polarity. Then Cassirer's project of explaining scientific symbolism contains a twofold problem: to place an immanent limit on science so that it will always use the expressive function; and to make the limit unattainable so that science is a continuing process and the expression function first developed by myth will be changing in a continuing progress. The solution is an "ideal limit": "The one reality can only be indicated and defined as the ideal limit of the many changing theories; yet the assumption of this limit is not arbitrary, but inevitable, since only by it is the continuity of experience established. No single astronomical system, the Copernican as little as the Ptolemaic, can be taken as the expression of the 'true' cosmic order, but only the whole of these systems as they unfold continuously according to definite connection" (SF 321-22). Cassirer is asserting that the truth of science lies, not in any single system, but in the development of individual explanations as integral contributions to the scientific endeavor. He claims that the ideal limit plays a necessary role in science. Insofar as it preserves the ongoing character of scientific activity, the concept is unattainable. Despite this trait, it is partially immanent within scientific thought so that it does not symbolize a transcendent reality. The ideal limit which theories approach solves the twofold problem of scientific symbolism. To clarify this general idea Cassirer's example of Galileo's achievement can be given. He rejected one absolute reality of science and replace it with a better one based on a new standpoint: "What Galileo gained with his idea of relativity was the cancelling of the absolute reality of place, and this first step involved for him the most weighty logical consequences, viz., the new concept of the lawfulness of nature and the new interpretation of the particular laws of dynamics. Galileo's doctrine of motion is rooted in a new standpoint from which to estimate and measure the phenomena of motion in the universe. By this choice, there was given him at once the law of inertia and in it the real foundation of the new view of nature (ETR 361). Cassirer means that Galileo has a specific scientific concept that is the main principle of unity and that he has a general sense which he shares with future scientists about the direction in which his field should take. Another example Cassirer gives of a later ideal limit in science is the new principle of the Theory of Relativity which overcomes the paradox of "the conflict between the principle of the constancy of the propagation of light and the principle of relativity of

214

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

mechanics" (ETR 370). He goes on in that passage to explain how an apparently unsolvable paradox was changed by Einstein into a new postulate of unity for the world. In Einstein's Theory of Relativity considered from the Epistemological Standpoint [originally published in 1921 but bound with the 1910 work, Substance and Function], Cassirer claims that Einstein's physics fulfills the theoretical aims of his field in a revolutionary way; this belief assumes the constancy of aims through the history of science: the theory of relativity is the "latest and most radical fulfillment of the motives which are inherent in the mathematical science as such."6 Such revoutionary and comprehensive new principles are the ideal limits in the history of science. Cassirer is partially forced to postulate the principle of unity called the ideal limit. It allows him to preserve his previous conclusions, such as that myth is a permanent symbolic form and that its universal function continues even in science, while at the same time explaining how knowledge can develop far beyond its original beginnings—even an infinite or indefinite development in the future. In this way, Cassirer's theory claims to be "ideal." On Cassirer's view the ideal limit of Galileo has a specific meaning as a scientific concept of his, just as there is a different concept for Einstein, which is the ideal limit for him. Cassirer's theory seems to require that there be some sense in which they—along with many others in the history of science—have the same meaning; he needs to claim that all the scientists are working toward a common goal so that the most systematic type of knowledge is continuous through its history. A break in the continuity would suggest a defect in the knowledge, according to Cassirer. How can the ideal limit have only a particular meaning and yet be the goal toward which all theories strive? Does Cassirer want to have it both ways? The meaning of the ideal limit seems ambiguously general and specific. Cassirer would like it to be thought of in the same manner as Bertrand Russell's theory of the propositional function; accordingly, the function of a series is not homogeneous with the members although it cannot remain independent of them (PSF III, 301). If Cassirer's comments on Russell's propositional function are used to interpret the meaning of the ideal limit, then they would show that it has two alternate yet exclusive meanings: it is what the philosopher uses to relate scientific theories and place them into a theory more comprehensive than any one science, and it is also the main principle of unity in any specific theory.

Myth Recurs and Progresses

215

It is perhaps not a coincidence in intellectual history that the main lines of Cassirer's entire philosophy were known to Cassirer but not yet developed at the same time that Russell published his main work on the propositional function and Einstein developed the theory of relativity: this fact shows that there is a level of development across many areas within cultures. The concept of an ideal limit is unclear or problematic, but at this point in a discussion of his theory of myth it does not need to be explained further. WHAT THE IDEAL LIMIT ACCOMPLISHES IN GENERAL FOR HIS PHILOSOPHY AND IN PARTICULAR FOR THE THEORY OF MYTH What the Ideal Limit Accomplishes in General for His Philosophy The difficult idea to interpret as unambiguous accomplishes some important tasks in his philosophy. It allows him to avoid a contradiction: the significative function of science no longer needs the expressive function of myth but yet myth's function must be universal. Another way to state the same problem is to say that the expressive function would become so different from itself that it would no longer fit the original definition. Also, the ideal limit serves to bring about the closure of the philosophy of Cassirer's and with it his theory of myth. It marks the structural completion of his philosophy. More than one scholar calls it the apogee of his system.7 It does this by providing an ideal that can never be fully attained. In this way it would be applicable to any future development in knowledge and so Cassirer would have a "theory" in the proper sense of a viewpoint able to or claiming to be able to predict some future events. The future of science would be a continuation of its past: the increasing detachment from ordinary sense perception of physical objects by the use of more ideal symbols to create theories with greater and greater universality and validity. In his view, the symbols of science become increasingly more powerful, meaning that a symbol has a greater capacity to represent a larger portion of experience, that experience itself is broader or deeper (more is known), and that the processes of human thinking are more known through the symbols (PSF III, 285). A symbol and the system of symbols tend to become more consciously connected in a process he calls "synthetic supplementation" or "the combination of

216

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

the single instance with the totality" (LM 89). Besides attributing greater universality and validity to the system of knowledge, Cassirer also means that each symbol is known more determinately; its differences from other symbols can be explained in more depth as can its greater number of possible relationships to other symbols. In myth, the relations between things were felt, not consciously explained or analyzable, as they eventually become in science. Another role of the ideal limit is to make "the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" comprehensive. With the concept, Cassirer can explain the development of knowledge from myth through the knowledge of the empirical worldview to that of the most recent development—and the highest possible—modern science. As Van Roo points out, all concept formation develops toward an ideal limit ("Symbol according to Cassirer and Langer," 664). So there would be versions of an/the ideal limit in myth, religion, art, and "language." The ideal limit makes the "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" continuous despite the revolutions in worldviews. Perhaps most of all the ideal limit helps to establish the position of the philosopher in relation to all the specific symbolic forms of culture. The philosopher can relate and understand the development of all those forms only if his/her perspective is above but not outside the theory of knowledge he argues for (the theory must be reflexive and apply to philosophical knowledge). Essentially, Cassirer attempts to form an ideal system of knowledge and all of his main original concepts are ideal, not empirically derived. They are obtained by arguing that they must be assumed in order to assure the continuity (i.e., the possibility) of knowledge. Speaking idealistically, he writes, "We must follow an indirect way: we must analyze the forms of human culture in order to discover the true character of space and time in our human world" (EM 42). Cassirer's aim is not empirical—the ultimate aim is not, for example, to explain why some primitives do this or do that. Actually, the primitives have their own answers so the question if merely empirical would involve no interpretation. If the mythical worldview needs to be interpreted, it is done for the sake of value judgments (myth is naive or the opposite) or of defining the present level of knowledge through its relation to the mythical one. Cassirer wants to find a unity in all the different types of spatial and temporal behavior, and such a unity throughout all the symbolic forms would be a philosopher's ideal limit of space and of time. Cassier does not actually define what all ideas of space have in

Myth Recurs and Progresses

217

common, though he does speak about their tendency to become what they are now in modern science. They tend to become systematic, scientific. They tend to order the world into a more unified network of conceptions. What the Ideal Limit Accomplishes in Particular for His Theory of Myth The ideal limit satisfies two conditions: by it science can continue to use the expressive function albeit modified, and science can develop forever. The characteristic function of science, the significative, thus changes along with the other two functions, the expressive and the representative (PSF III, 404). These functions change together and change each other. This idea of an ideal gradation within a set of functions is a more abstract version of Cassirer's belief that a culture has a level of knowledge, meaning that the science of the Egyptians fits with their religion and with their language and other areas so as to make a single worldview in which a development in one area would either lead to one in another area or would occur at roughly the same time as developments in other areas. The main conclusion for the theory of myth is that the expressive function, most characteristic of it rather than the other worldviews, is not eclipsed by the significative function of science. The function continues beyond myth and is developed on increasingly higher levels of symbolic functioning. The original mythic power to symbolize becomes transformed, becomes improved, and as a result reappears in new ways. Myth or the mythic power recurs in cultures that are no longer primitive because myth tends toward the ideal limit that science does. All forms of knowledge do. HOW MYTH DEVELOPS TOWARD THE IDEAL LIMIT Myth, Like Science and All Symbolic Forms, Is a Mode of Objectivization Lévi-Strauss believes myths are objective, not just subjective, insofar as they are solutions to paradoxes produced by previous myths.8 Regarding this approach as "exaggerated," G.S. Kirk still wants to see myths as "speculative": "as concerned with problems in society or incompatibilities between culture and nature" (vi). Cassirer's work emphasizes more the status of myth as a type of thought and therefore of knowledge. It is

218

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

to be expected that an epistemologist would do this, and the fact that Cassirer writes before them and reacts against the past tendencies to regard myth as anti-rational or a mistake. Cassirer's theory defines the objective status of myths more analytically. To claim that myth is a mode of objectivization means that myth has some grasp of reality (or a reality); it makes a real world with objects (PSF III, 68). At least within the mythical worldview there is some agreement and consensus about the way things are, and the worldview is adequate enough for survival. In addition, "objectivization" means making an ideal world, one enduring beyond the immediate present and one partially made by mere possibilities (EM 228). To say that the world is ideal is to say that its unity is a unity of perspective and of symbolic representations. The unity of space is not an object in space but is a concept making objects belong together. "The world as a whole," Cassirer writes, "has split into determinate, enduring, and unitary forms" (PSF II, 200). As a mode of objectivization myth forms a rather self-contained worldview (PSF II, 14). Its symbols can apply to any phenomenon encounterable, and Cassirer's main prinicples are comprehensive enough to explain the whole of primitive cultures. The mythical worldview is objective insofar as there is a striving for unity in all its creations and actions; any idea or object is related to others and has some degree of coherence in the network of the worldview (PSF II, 251; EM 25). Any mode of objectivization has within it its source of progress, so myth is a perspective that can get better, more advanced. It is not the case that only science progresses. On Cassirer's view, even in myth the earlier phases suggest developments in the later ones (PSF II, 62). Accordingly, it is fundamental to myth to lead to more advanced thought; myth is a way of self-development, a path "by which mankind has advanced both to its specific self-consciousness and to its specific objective consciousness" (16). In general, Cassirer believes the nature of the symbol is to "point beyond itself (PSF III, 129) because the meaning of a symbol is in a dynamic tension with the manner of its formation (PSF III, 118). Liszka calls this inherent trait of myth "transvaluation" ("Part I: The Development of a Theory of Transvaluation," in The Semiotic of Myth). Cassirer explains the possibility of mythical progress by the idea of "symbolic pregnance": . . . the perception itself which by virtue of its own immanent organization, takes on a kind of spiritual articulation—which, being ordered in itself, also belongs to a determinate order of meaning. . . . It is this

Myth Recurs and Progresses

219

ideal interwovenness, this relatedness of the single perceptive phenomenon, given here and now, to a characteristic total meaning that the term 'pregnance' is meant to designate' " (PSF' III, 202).

To the English speaker this translation from the German term makes it sound as if it means that one symbol is born from another or comes from another. While Cassirer would not object to this sense as part of the meaning it is not the essential part. As Blumenberg points out, the German word "prägen" means to stamp or imprint and has associations with Goethe's "geprägte Form," which Cassirer is well aware of (111). "Pregnance" is not an English word. By reading unpublished manuscripts at Yale University, Krois has found that Cassirer gets the term from Gestalt psychology and so the term suggests a whole pattern present in particular phenomena ("Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Metaphysics," 450 and 53-54 Symbolic Forms and History). Verene agrees and further explains Cassirer's important idea: "The symbol is never merely physical but it is never without physical being . . . in sensory experience we are never presented with a bare perceptive datum which is then interpreted and joined with further conceptual content... we are always presented in perception with an act that contains a definite direction and determinate character" ("Cassirer's Concept of Symbolic Form and Human Creativity," 19). This "definite direction" is the type of symbolism in myth or in any symbolic form and it implies that the purpose of symbols is to lead to an awareness of the type of their formation. This self-reflexive property is apparent when Verene writes, "The act of perception has within its own immanent structure a total orientation of spirit. The different structures of the world of Geist that we see writ large in the different symbolic forms that make up human culture rest on different orientations present in the act of perception" ("Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture," 137). How the Ideal Limit Is in Myth The ideal limit in myth is a principle of unity ordering all other conceptions. This principle evolves as the mythical worldview becomes more advanced. Mana is a very early form of it, then symbols of the center of the cosmos, such as a cosmic pole or tree, and then primordial beings which caused the cosmos, and in late stages of myth principles of creation. The way myth creates unity differs from those of the empirical and the scientific worldviews. The law of thinking in each case defines the

220

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

type of ideal limit evolving in each of them. In myth it is the law of the fusion of the members of series resulting in the creation of a single new figure as the principle of unity. Without such a hypostatization myth cannot form increasingly universal ideas and a stronger mind. Myth needs to refer the different objects and actions to "a fixed center, to one particular mythical figure" (PSF II, 203). Moira is a good example. In it we have a truly typical feature common in the history of religions to almost all peoples. Again and again we meet with this notion that the entire course of events in time stands under the control of a single force, which itself does not belong to events and is not defined by them. The order, according to which time moves on and according to which everything that happens is granted a particular length of time, a limited life span, is not itself something which has come about. It is a being, something nontemporal and eternal... a law holds which is above time and governs the rise and fall of everything but that this law itself is not of the temporal order so that it is a power above time and so also above the personal. Even here, where we are still moving in a basic sphere of mythic thought and awareness, consciousness has an early inkling that the law of coming to be and passing away to which all life is subject can no longer be conceived to belong completely to the circle of life and particular things. In the organization of mythic consciousness a basic tension remains, a latent contradiction: the image of the mythic universe, an all-encompassing and all-controlling order of time and fate, is attained only through a gradual dissolution and release from the mythic category of individuality" (PSF IV, 100). In myth, the unity of the cosmic order is still a specific thing in it, not an abstract principle as in postmythical thinking. Cassirer's writings on myth argue for a development from the earliest principles of mythical unity to the beginnings of science and postmythical thinking. The development in the principles of unity is continued up to modern science, and will continue. THE RECURRENCE OF MYTH IN POSTMYTHICAL WORLDVIEWS The fact that myth has the ideal limit in it connects myth to other worldviews in a continuous line of development of thought. In postmythical experience, because the 'same ' ideal limit is present there as well, features

Myth Recurs and Progresses

221

of myth recur and always will. Cassirer explains the recurrence as the reappearance of mythical or myth-like images and as the related change of these images. Myth in some sense has a role in later culture, and Cassirer also claims myth is renewed by subsequent development (LH 196). The clearest example of the recurrence of mythical images is in religion and in art. In the history of religion, mythical images are given a new allegorical significance because of a change from the mythical perspective (PSF II, 245 ff.). Cassirer claims that they "have lost their actual life" but they continue to have power. This change in the symbols of myth is gradual, occurring over a long period of time and never completed (this is one sense of the "ideal" activity of a symbolic form—its process can continue indefinitely). Since the development from myth is gradual, it can seem as if myth continues to recur in religion; in other words, the breakaway from myth seems to be re-enacted again and again on higher levels of more advanced religion (242 and 248). In the case of religion, the images at first are the same as in the mythical worldview. Through the course of religion and in more advanced symbolic forms, though, Cassirer means that mythical symbols seem to recur at a higher level than myth. Cassirer claims that the unity of language and myth is "reasserted at a higher level" after language orders the world empirically, not mythically (LM 98). This recurrence can be seen in the fact that language continually has an emotive power as part of the meanings of words. Language continues to form metaphors which lead to more literal expressions (PSF II, 25). The process seems to occur in cycles on ever higher levels. At first there are metaphorical expressions which lead to more literal and determinate ones. This recurrence of myth in language is regarded by Cassirer as a "rejuvenation," which also occurs when literature changes and improves language (LH, 199). Through literature new feelings for life emerge that become institutionalized in the language. There is a "survival of ancient forms . . . certain typical, ever-recurring situations" have "specific pregnant forms of expression" created by the ancients" so that "Wherever the same feeling is suggested the old image which his art creates comes to life again" (202). The rejuvenating palingenesis of myth also occurs in science. Again and again at various points in the history of science, he claims, science first states principles in "a material, that is, semimythical form" (PSF II, 26). The repeated breakaway of science from myth—albeit at higher conceptual levels—characterizes the whole history of science and will continue to do so:

222

Cassirer and Langer on Myth . . . even in scientific knowledge the sharp distinction between thing on the one hand and attribute, state, and relation on the other results only gradually from unremitting intellectual struggles. Here too the boundaries between the 'substantial' and the 'functional' are ever and again blurred, so that a semimythical hypostasis of purely functional and relational concepts arises. The physical concept of force, for example, freed itself but slowly from this involvement. In the history of physics we frequently encounter attempts to understand and classify the different forms of action by attaching them to specific substances and their transference from one point in space to another, from one 'thing' to another. The physics of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century still spoke of a 'thermal substance,' an electrical or magnetic 'matter'. But while the true tendency of scientific, analytical-critical thinking is toward liberation from this substantial approach, it is characteristic of myth that despite all the 'spirituality' of its objects and contents, its 'logic'—the form of its contents—clings to bodies (PSF II, 59 and III, 448).

Of course, it should be remembered that the permanent power of myth, expression, works together with the other two universal functions throughout human civilization. In modern society the significative function characteristic of science is more dominant than it ever has been, whereas in primitive societies it was very undeveloped, being dominated by the expressive. The roots of science are both historically and structurally in myth. Science needs to have an "ultimate and concrete foundation in feeling, to which it points back and from which it continually arises anew" (PSF II, 145). There are echos of myth in science when Cassirer writes that there are similarities in their formative activities [See the end of Chapter 7 for a brief discussion]. Just as myth makes the principle of its worldview into a single mythical figure (e.g. moira), so too science can make its network into an object (a grand idea of unity), but of course the conceptions are on entirely different levels (PSF III, 400). With the idea of the recurrence of myth in postmythical societies and the progress in its distinctive function, Cassirer completes his third and final stage of his theory of myth. The first stage is the idea of myth as a worldview or symbolic form and the second is the idea of myth as having a universal function. The third may be called the idea of myth as developing toward an ideal limit. In the following chapter Cassirer applies this theory to the recurrence of myth in twentieth-century political life.

Myth Recurs and Progresses

223

NOTES 1

2

3 4 5 6 7

8

PSF III, 400. "The meaning of the ideal elements can never be disclosed in particular representations directed toward a concrete, intuitively tangible object, but only in a complex network of judgments. The form of mathematical objectivization implies, to be sure, that this network is itself made into an object and treated as such; however, the strict division between it and empirical things is not thereby annulled, but remains in force." Also see 436 and 465. Cassirer believes there must be differences, development, in each of the universal functions. See PSF III, 122, where he writes "all the structures of the theoretical world do not show one and the same mode and stability of articulation" and 118 where he writes "a dynamic tension between the content and representative function of a phenomenon." Cassirer discusses the development of myth into language and of language into science in PSF III, 448-449. Cassirer, "'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy," trans. Robert Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp in PEC, p. 880. PSF III, 448. Science is the "end" of the objectifying process of knowledge: its goal or last phase. Cited in Eggers' and Mayer's Ernst Cassirer, 14. Franz Meyer does in Ernst Cassirer, cited on 158-59 of the Garland bibliography on Cassirer's work. Donald Verene does in several of his works beginning with his doctoral dissertation. Cited in Liszka, The Semiotic of Myth, 9.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 9

Myth Affects Modern Life The Application of the Theory "For myth has not been really vanquished and subjugated. It is always there, lurking in the dark and waiting for its hour and opportunity " (MS 280).

This chapter discusses Cassirer's application of his theory to modern political life. Once his colleague and commentator on his works, Charles Hendel, wrote, "And of all persons qualified to treat of that myth [the modern myth of the fascistic state] Cassirer was supreme" (PSF I, X). Intellectually, Cassirer is qualified because he develops a thorough philosophical theory of myth in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, and personally he is qualified because he experienced and witnessed the rise of fascism in Germany as a Jewish professor living there until his political exile. The way he applies his theory and the new meaning of myth are important issues not only for modern politics but for daily life. FROM THE THEORY OF MYTH TO ITS APPLICATION There is an acclaimed honorary series The Library of Living Philosophers with volumes honoring John Dewey, George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, Benedetto Croce, G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell, Etienne Gilson, Karl Jaspers, and others, including Cassirer. According to Hendel, the contributors to the volume on Cassirer agree that his philosophy is essentially contained in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (PSF

I, xiii). In the three volumes published during his lifetime, the third called The Phenomenology of Knowledge is often regarded by scholars as the "apogee" of the system, as the statement of the last or most general concepts.1 The two main concepts, that of a universal function and of the ideal limit, are two turning points in his theory of myth which develop the idea of symbolic form further and complete his three-stage theory. 225

226

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

In a discussion of the application, there are the important questions whether the facts confirm the ideas and whether the application extends the theory or merely illustrates it. Hendel believes the theory allows Cassirer to "look ahead" and to see the implications of the events that unfold (PSF III, ix). Krois believes The Myth of the State broadens the scope of his theory by completing the merely intellectual account of myth with an interpretation of its current actual state (Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History 210). Verene describes the change from theory to its application as an "openly normative turn" (SMC 10). He means that there is no split between the earlier theory of myth and its later application; rather, the application is a logical development of the theory into a statement of the ethical implications myth has for modern life. He makes it clear in several of his writings why Cassirer's philosophy is not like that of "philosophers of life" (SMC 295-97). Although Cassirer does offer an interpretation of the rise of Nazism through myths, the interpretation is not a direct understanding of events but an indirect one through a theoretical framework. I understand Verene's view to mean that the philosopher must have a general outlook in order to avoid any prejudice caused by one's personal situation and even perhaps that it is not the business of philosophy to make specific decisions, whether political, economic, ethical, or other. Philosophy only creates concepts which raise the level of thinking—a kind of cultural matrix—and with this increased ability better decisions about one's life can be made by individual, personal adaptations of the concepts to actual situations. These adaptations are clearly done after the theory is complete; Cassirer applied his theory after it was complete. Cassirer's Myth of the State is still not so specific as to state that the people should or should not have taken this particlar course of action or that one; rather, it defines the type of thinking active in actual events and suggests how it might be judged. THE COEXISTENCE OF MYTH AND OTHER FORMS IN MODERN CULTURE In Cassirer's theory science and language occur in primitive societies in a way different from the ways they do today; for example, the "systematic [scientific] order of space" is present in myth but it "does not go beyond this sphere" (PSF III, 150). The unique principles of myth, what makes it a symbolic form and its universal function, are so dominant that it is virtually a misnomer to say that those other cultural activities exist in the first human worldview. To speak of a "primitive physics" or "primi-

Myth Affects Modem Life

227

tive history," for example, is to speak as if the concepts of myth could be allegorical, whereas he does not think they can at that stage (PSF II, 62 and 164). In contrast, to regard myth tautegorically would mean to understand that its protscientific behavior has a different purpose in the primitive mind than it would for the modern. Still, Cassirer does claim that within the mythical worldview there are subordinate "strata" which eventually become more defined in postmythical life (PSF II, 66.69). Without the presence of abilities and functions—however undeveloped, it would be hard to explain the continuity of myth with later worldviews arising from it. The various strata of the symbolic forms within any actual culture are constantly shifting in emphasis: the present levels of knowledge constantly become subordinate to newer higher ones. This means that within the mythical worldview there is a steady progress of subordinating older mythical conceptions to ones closer to the modern empirical worldview. In this process many symbolic forms emerge directly from myth: religion, art, language, history, ethics, and philosophy, among others. They do this through the process of placing some primitive conceptions on lower strata of an actual society. He claims, "The primitive demon mythology was not done away with, but it was relegated to a low level of popular faith" (PSF II, 113). Astrology, he points out, coexisted with Babylonian astronomy (PSF II, 90). The pseudo-science continues even today. In modern society it is clear that less educated portions of society think with superstition and prejudice that could only be avoided by acquiring the learning that the other portions of society have. Therefore, he believes various strata coexist within myth and beyond it. Beyond myth, various strata coexist in more developed states; people can be actually superstitious in private life yet quite "scientific" in their profession, or religious in attitude yet knowledgeable in the advanced biology of evolution. As Verene points out about Cassirer's view, certainly some of the subordinated strata of human civilization remain in the depths of the human psyche for a long time and perhaps forever, of course overlaid and conditioned by all subsequent developments ("Cassirer's Political Philosophy" 33). This view calls to mind the Freudian concept of the id; myth would be something like the id of culture, first developed in infancy and developed throughout life, though new powers—the ego and the superego—characterized more of the development in periods after infancy. Then myth would coexist with other cultural strata as a background force, a force from the past, silently shaping the activity of more

228

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

developed human powers and in turn being shaped by more developed versions of itself and of other powers. Cassirer speaks of myth as influencing more developed forms because it is a "dimension" of them, albeit not by any means dominant (EM 11). In postmythical societies myth is "restricted" in its domain of influence. The restricting of myth means that other cultural areas (e.g. art, ethics, or science) are stronger or superior or better forces against it. Myth continues to have its prerogative within experience, though a changing one through the course of human civilization. The strata within any culture work together and can change one another. One example is the change in Greek religion caused by the epic (PSF II, 196). On Cassirer's view, the influence results from a dynamic struggle of the different strata (PSF I, 82); change is seldom easy. Turbulent social struggles accompanying changes in religion as its different denominations seem to become increasingly secularized throughout history might provide an example. Another could be the debates between evolutionary theory and biblical creation starting in the nineteenth century. THE RECURRENCE OF MYTH: WHEN AND WHY When Cassirer first conceived of the idea of a symbolic form, he thinks of it as a division of reality into a self-contained domain of meaning based on symbols. Furthermore, no such aspect of reality could simply stop, for then it could not have been part of (ultimate) reality to begin with. Then myth could not recur after a period of being completely inactive; its recurrence means that, after a period of much less influence than it had in primitive societies, it begins to have noticeable influence again. Then "myth" in postmythical society would be partial or changed, in ways yet to be defined. Cassirer does not define in detail the senses in which myth forms experience in postmythical societies, but an analogy to Clifford Geertz's idea of the programming power of cultural patterns can help (92-93). In Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures the physiology of animals determines the instincts of nest building, food gathering, and mating practices and in the case of human beings cultural patterns "program" the human behavior (92-93). Cassirer claims that myth is part of the program of human behavior—it may be less or more, and its nature may change, though it still has a role. Myth is essential to the instituting of a worldview and the making of its most elementary units; it presents an individual content,

Myth Affects Modern Life

229

makes images through feeling, and displays the feeling as part of the outward form.2 Despite myth's continuing role, no matter how minimal it might be, Cassirer argues there can be a fairly sudden greater influence of myth in an advanced culture. The recurrence or more negative term resurgence results from very strong feelings among the people in times of crisis when the rational ties holding the community together are no longer adequate "to combat the demonic mythical powers" (MS 280). Then some terrible misfortune is afflicting society; there may not be an adequate social structure to solve the problem; society may have to change; or, following an interpretation of Verene's, social science may not be developed enough ("Cassirer's View of Myth and Symbol" 559). On this view the laws of society, even today, lag behind those of nature, having come later in intellectual history. Primarily, Cassirer believes, there is a resurgence of myth when other superior forces are unable to restrict myth to a limited field and to a subordinate position: the forces of art, history, ethics, religion, philosophy, logic, law, and so on, all being more developed, advanced human activities. A psychological analogy would be that when a person is experiencing a troubled time, when social ties are not strong enough to support him/her, then the id may begin to have more of a role in life than it should—perhaps an uncontrolled one—and in a way that it should not, a way reverting to unsatisfactory adaptive behavior of a much earlier age. This analogy colors the recurrence of myth so as to become a negative event, and it should be mentioned that positive recurrences of myth can also occur, according to Cassirer, and will be described. In the case of the myth of the Nazi state Cassirer is particularly qualified to discuss the failure of philosophers to combat the evil. Agreeing with Albert Schweitzer, Cassirer thinks the causes of Nazi Germany were not merely social and economic but also cultural ('Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics" 244). The German philosopher, Karl Jaspers, whom Cassirer does not discuss, realized the possible impending danger in his Situation of Our Time (Die geistige Sit-

uation der Zeit 1931), as interpreted in an article entitle "German Philosophy and National Socialism": The physiognomy of the age "is characterized by the unsheltered man. . .. There is no god, is the clamor of the masses [sic]; and hence man is worthless, slaughtered in large numbers, because he is nothing." The writer of these words was filled with deep apprehension and

230

Cassirer and Langer on Myth horror at the approaching disaster, and he intended his book as an eleventh-hour appeal to what was noblest in man. But in the confusion of these years the existentialist appeal seemed an ambiguous message.3

The message of Jaspers could be ambiguous because, besides being Jaspers' call for an existential turn toward ethics and culture, it could be misunderstood by some as a call for the grand project of National Socialism to remake Germany and the world. It is well known that war was only a first step in Hitler's plan; the next was a civilization of a higher, German order; architectural projects had been planned. The article lists many clearly pro-Nazi philosophers, which Cassirer does not discuss. Alfred Rosenberg wrote the racist book, The Myth of the Twentieth Century; Hermann Glockner, editor of a periodical, changed the name of a well-known periodical and made it pro-Nazi; Hans Heyse wrote a philosophy of history in which the Third Reich is the solution to the separation of the idea from existence; Kurt Hildebrandt wrote that Plato was the enemy of democracy; Alfred Bäumler wrote that philosophy should substitute for the idea of existence the figure of Adolf Hitler; and Ernst Krieck created a philosophy of education for the master race. Among other supporters was Martin Heidegger, whom Cassirer does discuss at length and with whom Cassirer debated in person and criticized in his writings. While Cassirer was fired for being Jewish and being critical of Nazism in 1933, the event which led to his permanent exile, Heidegger was appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg. In his address he described Hitler as the "actualization of true philosophy" (Ibid.). Another example of his pro-Nazi stance occurs in his Introduction to Metaphysics: "The works that are being peddled about nowadays as the philosophy of National Socialism but have nothing whatever to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely the encounter between global technology and modern man)—have all been written by men fishing in the troubled waters of 'values' and 'totalities.' " 4 Cassirer's criticism of Heidegger is not one directed toward his personal behavior. Cassirer does not state that Heidegger should have refused the job or emigrated from Germany or taken up arms against the Nazis or any other specific concrete action. Instead, Cassirer criticzes Heidegger for not having provided adequate philosophical concepts so that the German people could have known about their ethical duty (MS 293). Heidegger wrote about the confinement of the human being to actual life situations, not the ability of people to rise above circumstances

Myth Affects Modern Life

231

and create a better world that has never yet existed. Heidegger reduced the human situation to one of "throwness" in the world and interpreted human abilities only in terms of immediate experience. In a footnote in The Phenomenology of Knowledge (149), Cassirer explicitly compares Heidegger's theory of space to that of myth, suggesting that the philosophy is limited to a mythical perspective in Cassirer's sense. Other scholars point out the same comparison. The famous French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, calls Heidegger's philosophy either a "myth or a fashion" (vii The Phenomenology of Perception). A leading Cassirer scholar, John Michael Krois, cites the fact that Cassirer compares the Heideggerian theory of space with the space experienced by animals and aphasiacs ("Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism, and Metaphysics" 451). Other books discuss the Nazism and the mythological character of Heidegger's work (John D. Caputo's Demythologizing Heidegger, Indiana University

Press, 1993, and Victor Farias' Heidegger and Nazism, Temple University Press, 1989). Along with Heidegger, Oswald Spengler is criticized by Cassirer for failing to provide adequate philosophical concepts for people to use them to understand their ethical duty. Verene explains: Cassirer sees behind Spengler's theory of history a reduction of historical reality to mythic structures such that, as he says, in Spengler the philosophy of hisotry becomes the art of divination. He sees in Heidegger's concept of Geworfenheit or "throwness" a view of man which regards him as a being confined within the historical conditions of his existence, a being who can understand these conditions but not change them. What troubles Cassirer, and what becomes the theme of the last chapter of The Myth of the State is that on such views philosophy no longer is seen as an agency of human freedom. The proper understanding of the relationship between spirit or culture and life is lost, and man confines his understanding of himself simply to exploring the structures of the immediate conditions of his existence without seeing himself as the creator of these structures and the developer of them into the forms of cultural order ("Cassirer's Concept of Symbolic Form" 14; and see SMC 32). Spengler's major work is pessimistic, fatalistic, and myth in Cassirer's theory always has a sense of fate, little of freedom. Heidegger's philosophy is the same, confining humanity to its immediate experience rather

232

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

than creating new ethical ideals. In Cassirer's discussion of the end of myth proper he describes it sometimes as a new awareness of an individual self and responsibility. There are at least three other reasons why, on Cassirer's view, myth recurs in twentieth-century politics. It is a "powerful potential energy" which is "only waiting for the moment" when it can reappear (LH 196). In this passage myth is described as having new life put into it when it recurs; here there is a suggestion that myth is preserved and rejuvenated through its reappearance. The reappearance of myth may be a cultural regression. This can occur because cultural unity is dynamic, each activity struggling with others, influencing them, and so myth may become more dominant for a time (LH 190). The struggle is apparent in social problems caused by debates between fundamentalist religious leaders and evolutionists about school curriculum, whether to teach Biblical creation or evolution, or both. Individual human beings can also revert to a state like childhood when under hypnosis, after types of brain injuries, or in their dreams and subconscious life. Such facts suggest that the past is not completely done away with; it may remain in the depths of the psyche as an undercurrent influencing layers "above" and "later" than it. Another reason for the recurrence of myth is the emergence of the dominant force of technology in shaping society. Technology tends to make people feel anonymous (as in Kafka's works), to break down community ties and communication among people (as in Beckett's works), and lives become fragmented into functions. Myth creates a sense of identity, of community, and of common purpose. So technology must use some myths to supplement its deficiencies. At the end of An Essay on Man Cassirer asserts that philosophy seeks a fundamental unity in all the activities of human culture. Technology uses myths to give people the sense that through technology people have a purpose in life and life has its fundamental unity. This issue of the union of technology and myth will be discussed in more detail through the specific description of the myth-making of the Nazis. Then there are at least seven reasons why Cassirer believes myth can recur: myth is a universal cultural pattern, sometimes other cultural activities which limit myth become weak, social laws may not be known well enough, there can be social crises, myth is a powerful potential energy, cultural regression can result because of the dynamic relation of its areas, and technology needs the power of myth to complete the total sense of life, whether this is done satisfactorily or not.

Myth Affects Modern Life

233

THE MYTHICAL STATUS OF NAZI POLITICS Studies on the Myths of the Nazis Many books and articles explain different dimensions of the myths making Nazi Germany possible. Cassirer's Myth of the State (1946) was or was among the first. Three examples can show some types of approach. Gombrich wrote Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts (A Creighton Lecture. Athlone Press, University of London, 1994). This shows the role of the media in disseminating Nazi propadanda partially successful because of the persuasion of a big lie: if something is so outrageous or believed by so many people it must be true. Another is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners; Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Knopf, 1996), which assigns responsibility to ordinary citizens. Also, Ken Anderson wrote Hitler and the Occult (N.J.: Prometheus Books, 1995) to show how Hitler was personally interested in the occult and how his political project paralleled this interest. The Mythical Elements of Nazi Politics The mythical elements are best seen in the stories that became public policy and the types of political events that were arranged. Through them strong collective wishes were redirected to new specific goals, much language was changed to gain a Nazi meaning, individual thinking was suppressed, and historical truth was eclipsed by myths so that the myths seemed to be history. Cassirer declares: "It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology—or rather, the mythology of a people does not determine but is its fate, its destiny as decreed from the very beginning" (PSF II, 5). He believes this holds true of all cultures, the better and the worse. According to this sense of the comprehensive role of myth, the Nazi leaders could not have been above all myth, even though they seemed to control the myths believed by the masses, and must have had new versions of the pre-existing ones, coexisting for a time in the same culture. The myths of Aryan superiority supporting the Nazi regime have a deep background in the history of Germany, as Cassirer explains in The Myth of the State. This background helps in the operation of a myth, for even if people do not know the origin of present attitudes about Jews, for example, the myth operates in them by being an undercurrent of feeling shared by many people, having been handed down through generations

234

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

in various forms, and having had their effect on a constellation of ideas running throughout the whole culture. One recurring idea in Nazi speeches is the idea of the destiny of the German people. This idea, claims Cassirer, is a sign of mythical thinking; it deprives people of a sense of freedom to change the situation and commits them to extremes of action (MS 290). It was an idea starting a few decades before World War II and becoming stronger in the propaganda of the 1930s. In a book by Fran_chois Furet (Le Passe d'une illusion, Paris: Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995), the effect of a belief in destiny is explained. Tony Judt reviews the work and summarizes the "Self-serving Myths": "It [Furet's book] is about the self-serving myths of our century and the illusions we still harbour concerning them; it is about the damaging impact that the invocation of necessity or circumstance can have on moral evaluation, and the radical inapplicability of nineteenth- (or eighteenth-) century analogies and expectations to twentieth-century experience [the hyphens are in the original text]."5 Another feature of myths needed to be used in modern politics is the fact that they imply an act of belief (EM 75). Unlike art or other cultural areas leading up to science, myth does not have the capacity to confirm its ideas by verification with the empirical world, nor does it understand its images as creations of its own to be used for a purpose; primitives are under the spell of their own creations—the image of a demon can cause fear. A third element of the Nazi mythical politics is the unconscious nature of myths. Cassirer points out that myths are products of the community, not the individual and are traditionally unconscious (MS 282). In contrast, the modern political myths are consciously designed by government officials to evoke already existing unconsciously felt myths popular among the masses. Though Cassirer does not define the difference between the two, obviously he believes there are two levels of mythical awareness, that of the leaders and that of the followers. The leaders as technicians of a new state do not believe the popular myths in the same way as the people do (with the exception perhaps of Hitler and a few other hybrid cases). They believe them as means to an end, whereas the people believe them as ends in themselves. Though not cited by Cassirer, the Memoirs of Albert Speer, one of the highest ranking Nazis, describes the conscious strategy for creating the new mythical worldview to suit Nazi purposes. For example, political rallies were events like primitive ritual: fires burned, flags waved, large masses of people gathered, smoke filled the air, people lost their individual identity through uniforms and mass

Myth Affects Modern Life

235

chanting, songs drowned out the critical reflection on the rallies, and the content of speeches inflamed very old popular myth redirected to new aims and consolidated by the sense of destiny replacing the despair of the economically stricken, internationally humiliated Weimar Republic. A good description of the unconscious feeling prevalent before the Nazis came to power occurs in Steven F. Walker's Jung and the Jungians on Myth. Present in many patients Jung noticed images of ancient myths of Wotan, a god of storm and wind, which preceded the policy of war (105). This fact shows that myth is a community phenomenon, a view held by Cassirer and many others in various ways, and that the modern human community has an undercurrent of feeling rooted in its ancient past just as the individual does. The Significance of the Jewish People in Nazi Myths Cassirer's interest in the prejudice against the Jewish people is not only academic. Since he was a Jew he knew it would be hard to become a lecturer at The University of Berlin (as early as 1907), and getting promotions was difficult for Jews (PEC 15-16). On the level of popular myth even before Nazi propaganda the Jewish people were discriminated against by other Germans—ordinary citizens. In Cassirer's theory of myth, there are always demons and divine beings, in this case in the Nazi mind the Jews were the demons and the pure German Aryans, the divine. The strange obsession with the Jews is obvious in Hitler's eleventh anniversary address of the National-Socialist regime, in 1944, when German was being progressively defeated. Cassirer points out that rather than speak about the destruction of Germany Hitler is worried about the "triumph" of the Jews, as if it is they who would be the victors in the case of the defeat of Germany, whereas there were not many left alive.6 Cassirer's theory of myth explains the demonic status of the Jewish people in the following way. In the words of a biographer of Cassirer, Cassirer "showed why the Nazis had chosen the Jews as their ideological enemy Number One—while the Nazis based their power upon historical and social myths, the Jews have always shown little inclination for mythical thought" (Schilpp 33, see Altmann 171). The Jewish sense of individual responsibility is anathema to fascistic ideology. If myth implies an act of belief, then perhaps the worst enemy is the one who does not believe, not the one who believes but is ideologically opposed. Not guns but anti-mythical, religious-ethical ideals of the Jewish

236

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

people may have been the most feared enemy. Myths operate to control cultures, not only in bad ways but also in good ones. The problem is that if only myth is in control and not also ethics and other rational cultural activities, it may just as well be good as bad (Liszka 16). Since myths tend to become universal, circulate through a culture, create community ties, any attitudes not assimilatable by the myths become dangerous, claims Liszka, and this seems to be Cassirer's view stated in other terms. The Elimination of the Sense of Individual Responsibility and Ethical Choice It is a stereotype today to feel outraged when a person in an official position is charged with a crime and accounts for the actions not by arguing that they are right but by simple stating that he/she is simply following orders. In Hitler's Willing Executioners the Harvard historian Daniel Goldhagen assigns responsibility to the ordinary German citizens, not primarily to the Nazi leaders who may be thought to have put them under a spell or controlled them militarily. The book is quite controversial and hated by many Germans: not for blaming the ordinary citizen who simply followed orders, on the contrary, for bringing into the open and thus questioning the "deeply rooted anti-Semitism peculiar to Germany" going back deep into the past.7 (One is reminded of Freud's general principle that emotional ties gain intensity with the duration of the relation, and one could add that especially in this case the emotions also become more blind as to their real reasons.) Goldhagen felt criticism "with a fury that brings to mind those who seek to squelch someone who has violated a deeply held taboo" (Ibid.). The emotive power of myth is present in the issue, as is its unconscious nature, its function of producing a belief in some "reality," and its effect of creating community bonds and a sense of nationhood. The wife of Cassirer in her memoirs reports the absence of the sense of individual responsibility combined with the fervor of group feeling: "The first [official Nazi] publications were not all that alarming. Nothing was mentioned about persecution or laws restricting Jews. But, then one day one of Hitler's edicts read: 'Whatever serves the Führer is law'. Ernst said to me, 'If tomorrow every jurist in Germany to a man does not rise up and protest these paragraphs, then surely Germany is lost'. Not a single voice spoke out."8 Jung seems to assess the responsibility wrongly. As reported by Walker, Jung does not want to assign responsibility to the Germans, preferring instead to think of them as under a kind of spell, to which they also were victims (106). Walker emphasized Jung's mistake (109).

Myth Affects Modern Life

237

Aside from this misjudgment considered from an ethical perspective—not from the psychological one intended by Jung, he is to be praised for so early and so accurately perceiving the mythical danger spreading throughout Germany: . . . already in 1918 Jung had noticed some 'unusual' disturbances in the unconscious of his German patients which he could not explain in terms of personal psychology, for they always found expression in dreams as mythological motifs of 'archetypes'. The archetypes he diagnosed in his patients suggested an eruption of primitive elements such as great violence and cruelty. After dealing with a considerable number of similar cases, he concluded that a 'strange' mental climate was prevalent in Germany, and in 'The Role of the Unconscious' (1918) suggested that the 'blond beast' had started stirring in its sleep.9

The conclusions of Jung serve to corroborate Cassirer's interpretation of the mythical status of Nazi political myths: an unconscious mental climate was used by Nazi leaders by directing it toward specific political aims. The Nazis themselves were not immune to the dangerous climate since they assisted in its development; nevertheless, they were conscious of it enough to make it instrumental for personal and political gain. The issue of myth and responsibility in modern society is multifaceted. Cassirer's main idea is that the Nazis tried to eliminate the sense of individual responsibility as in the statement, "Whatever serves the Führer is law." It is commonplace for us to become outraged at the taking away of the ability to choose. Perhaps even worse is the pleasure in having had ethical choice taken away; Cassirer cites a poignant, ironic example: 'To a German grocer, not unwilling to explain things to an American visitor', relates Stephen Raushenbush, T spoke of our feeling that something invaluable had been given up when freedom was surrendered. He replied: 'But you don't understand at all. Before this we had to worry about elections, and parties, and voting. We had responsibilities. But now we don't have any of that. Now we're free'.10

On Cassirer's view, this is the opposite of freedom. It shows the mythical acceptance of Nazi ideology, although in many cases as in this one the possibility of individual responsibility enters the mind—which it cannot in Cassirer's theory of primitive mentality—but is quickly and without much reflection rejected for the sake of a mass-type of existence, which

238

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

is closer to the reality of primitive life than the institutions and technology of modern society would have its citizens believe. MODERN MYTH IS UNITED WITH TECHNOLOGY The Resurgence Is Only Partial How can myth exist in a modern society with advanced technology? There are differing opinions about the issue whether primitive myth is the same as modern myth. Disagreeing with Franz Boas, who stated an extreme version of the view that myth has not changed for 10,000 years, Kirk calls contemporary myths "bastard modern forms" which are not "the real thing" (vii). On Cassirer's view, the issue is much more complex than asking whether myth is the same or not. First of all, the recurrence of myth is only partial. When myth recurs in political life it need not recur in the professional life of a citizen. A doctor who believes in the Nazi myths does not therefore revert to primitive methods of treating his/her patients. The mythical thinking is restricted to a limited aspect of life. Secondly, Cassirer's view allows for the fact that the modern political myths are in some sense more conscious than primitive myth is. They are designed by some leaders, yet they work only because they call upon pre-existing myths not so consciously synthesized. The citizens, too, can reflect on the acceptance or non-acceptance of them; no such choice, however, is possible for the primitive. Thirdly, Cassirer makes a distinction between the form of the mythical worldview and the permanent power first operating in myth and later operating in more advanced worldviews although somewhat changed. This expressive function is characteristic of myth, though strictly speaking not unique to it: a kind of ad hoc sublimation of mythical image-making proper so as to allow Cassirer to explain the continuity of myth with science. Nevertheless, the idea of the universal function allows Cassirer to claim that "myth" recurs today though not the complete worldview and not exactly in the same way. The Need for "Myth" in a Technological Society Modern myth is united with a technological attitude whereas primitive myth is not, in Cassirer's opinion, and the cooperation requires explanation: What we find here is one of the greatest paradoxes in human history. It is a myth that in a sense is completely 'rationalized'. Myth remains ir-

Myth Affects Modern Life

239

rational in its content, but it is very clear and conscious in its aims. The twentieth century is a technical century, and it applies technical methods to all fields of theoretical and practical activity. The invention and the skillful use of a new technical instrument—of the technique of political myths—decided the victory of the National Socialist movement in Germany" (MS 236).

So the modern politician combines two tendencies: first, the human being as magician and second, the human as technician (MS 282). In detail Cassirer explains how nineteenth-century intellectual movements lead up to the modern political myths, but the decisive factor is the advent of the dominating interest in techniques (MS 277). Though Cassirer does not explain this union fully, it follows from similar cases which he does explain fully. Technology, a possible symbolic form, is a stratum of actual cultures and could only become dominant by subordinating other necessary but earlier strata, one being myth. In Cassirer's theory, new developments in culture occur when new types of thinking subordinate the old ones which occupy lower levels of society, as astronomy subordinated astrology and still both coexisted in Egyptian society, or as religion subordinates older mythical attitudes toward the divine relegating them to popular folk beliefs in contrast to the new religious beliefs of the church leaders. It is important to note that originally the magical activities of primitives were superceded by advances in techniques (PSF II, 213). The rise of technology through myth is something like a palingenesis of the original change from myth to technology in the same way that religion constantly changes mythical images into the more advanced religious symbols. Another way to express the union in Cassirer's view is to think of the interest in magic as being like childhood experience which gets changed by adult ones but still remains in the depths of the psyche and plays a role in attitudes toward more advanced ways of thinking. Verene draws out the implications of Cassirer's explicit statements about the union of technology and myth. Technology fragments life, makes a split with the past, does not provide means of forming concepts of personal identity, and subverts feelings of community among people. "When coupled with technique," Verene explains, "it [myth] offers a feeling of significance and vision which technical life requires to make its advance meaningful" ("Technology and Myth," 5-6). He continues his interpretation: When the state is no longer seen as the embodiment of value and reason, but is experienced only as a self-directed process, the task of

240

Cassirer and Langer on Myth giving significance to the activities of the state still remains. Rational and ethical perspectives on the meaning of social action appear as matters of personal opinion. Politics and economics can become scientific disciplines in the sense of understanding the technical porcesses of social order, but the basis of the contemporary state in its actual life, in the life of the politician, is that of assigning mythical significance to objective processes that proceed entirely on the basis of a principle of efficient ordering ("Technology and Myth," 5-6).

Myths recur in a role subordinate to technological aims. The myths operate on a personal level, the level of social interaction and immediate sensory experience. They provide a sense of the self, of the community, and of the unity of life which technology cannot by itself provide. They could be provided by activities such as art, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and science but they were not strong enough in Nazi Germany to limit the more primitive mythical feelings. Quite early in the Nazi leadership of the country—six years before the invasion of Poland and in fact the very first year in power—the control of the universities and the media began. WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN DO TO COMBAT DANGEROUS POLITICAL MYTHS Not all political myths are bad according to Cassirer. The strong, almost exclusively negative tone in The Myth of the State is probably done for rhetorical reasons to match the severity of the consequences. The acceptable political myths will be discussed in the next section. Several scholars have a problem in understanding how philosophy can help in Cassirer's view (e.g. Franz E. Meyer). As has been mentioned, Cassirer does not believe the role of philosophy proper is to make direct decisions about empirical actions. Instead philosophy offers human ideals and self-knowledge—a perspective broader than the immediate moment with its passions and problems. In An Essay on Man Cassirer emphasizes those aims of philosophy and the endeavor to form fundamental concepts of unity about the whole of experience, to give life an overall meaning. The vast explosive changes brought about by technology seemed to cut modern society off from its heritage and its myths such that modern Germany needed a new vision of itself but in desperation looked to myths instead of culture to provide new orientation. This line of thinking expresses Cassirer's view and also

Myth Affects Modern Life

241

Albert Schweitzer's, both emphasizing the need for an overall conception of life. Commenting on Schweitzer's philosophy, Cassirer writes, "Now we have a generation which is squandering the precious heritage it has received from the past, and is living in a world or ruins, because it cannot complete the building which that past began" ("Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-century Ethics" 246). Myth helped technology complete the building of Nazi Germany, however misguided by its leaders, whereas the vision of a new life should have come only to a limited extent from myth so as to provide the feeling connection with the past; the greater force in shaping the new Germany should have come from the cultural areas. It is a common attitude among critics of technology (starting perhaps with Jaspers and Mumford and including Marcuse et al.) that it has the tendency to level all modes of thinking to a single common level on which the search for techniques dominates all other concerns and is given value by subordinated myths of progress, success, and material values. This fact could explain why myth—itself a force prior to a sense of personal identity—could be used in conjunction with the technical attitude. Myth could be used by technology, whereas cultural areas would critically reflect on technology and resist their being used for aims other than their own ideal ones. Cassirer believes philosophy must reserve for itself a perspective above the other individual cultural activities but not outside of them, such that it would dominate or control or determine their direction, yet it would form ideals of development. Myth tends to dominate other cultural areas because its tendencies toward universality are not consciously directed and have less explicit self-knowledge, unlike those of philosophy and other cultural areas. Without referring explicitly to Cassirer's ideas about the role of philosophy in life, Liszka agrees with them using other terms: . . . myth, its presentation, and its interpretation form a symbolic web by means of which humans control the rules and norms which govern and constitute the culture. Placing the myth in a sacred tradition or its source in direct revelation further cements the authority of those rules, norms, and values. But to leave myth as the final authority is to leave a gap in the critical and evaluative process that is the strength of human being [sic]. To subject myth to criticism, to lay bare the symbolics of its process, is to engage in the most comprehensive criticism of a culture. Whereas to control the myths in which a culture believes—to

242

Cassirer and Langer on Myth govern its symbolism—is to control the hearts and minds of a people, to allow the criticism of myth is to dilute that power, to loosen sedimentations of thought and belief that may be harmful to a community or, positively, to reaffirm beliefs and values that are indeed helpful. The task of critical semiotic is not to replace one dogma by another, but simply to disclose the rules of the symbolic processes by which symbols become such—to place control on that control—leading, as Peirce suggests, to self-control (16).

This passage from The Semiotic of Myth almost summarizes important points in Cassirer's interpretation of modern political myths. Especially relevant is the idea that old ideas, now inconsistent with the new, remain in a culture, sometimes "sedimented," and that they can be harmful in more modern times, if the more advanced ideas give way to the old. In Freudian psychology the id needs to be controlled by the ego (the mediator of self with external reality) but not too much; both should be balanced by the superego (the moral element). Just as in Freud's psychology the struggle is never completed, the exact balance never found once and for all, so too for Cassirer the forces of myth—for good or for bad—are always there to be reckoned with. MYTH AS A CONTINUING ASPECT OF MODERN POLITICAL LIFE Myth Is Not Evil; Yet It Should Not Be in Control The tone of The Myth of the State seems so negative towards the modern political myths that several scholars have interpreted Cassirer to be against them entirely. According to Christopher G. Flood in his Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction, that work by Cassirer is "an explanation and denunciation of political myth in the modern world" (257). Walker then criticizes Cassirer for not allowing myths their positive role. It is true that Cassirer denounces the political myth of the Nazis; it is not true he denounces myth in politics after the Nazi disaster. If myth were evil, this late idea would be diametrically opposed to the theory of myth in volume II of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Three commentators present ideas that form the basis of a defence of Cassirer. The semiotician and philosopher, James J. Liszka, writes, "But to leave myth as the final authority is to leave a gap in the critical and evaluative process that is the strength of human beings" (The Semi-

Myth Affects Modern Life

243

otic of Myth 16). Clearly from the previous discussion Cassirer believes myth has a role, though not the only or dominant one, and in any case it should have a subordinate influence in comparison to more advanced cultural activities, such as sociology or philosophy. Hendel does not interpret Cassirer's ideas to mean that modern myth is evil; rather, it is necessary to understand one's myths in order not to lead possibly to evil consequences (PSF I, Preface x). Verene consolidates these two views in defence of Cassirer when he writes, "The danger is not that the state requires an image of itself as part of its political life, but that the process of images and their immediacy becomes the very being of the state. At such a point all reality of law and political principle is lost. . ." ("Cassirer's Political Philosophy" 33). One final point can suggest a feature of myth that is undesirable in the modern world. According to Philip Rieff, Lévi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning is about "the totalitarian ambition of the savage mind as it throbs beneath the surface of the 'civilized' mind."11 On Cassirer's view mythical thought is not advanced enough to require verification for its concepts, especially empirical confirmation or experimental proof; mythical ideas always require an act of belief. In modern life this may lead to intolerance such as the intolerance of a fundamentalist religion that will not permit alternative readings of the Bible or permit other people to have abortions. Some types of modern mythical thinking are "totalitarian" in the sense of being intolerant of other views, for an act of belief is part of the ideas and cannot be critically reflected on or challenged. The views exclude all others. How Myth Is Essential in Politics Cassirer hardly makes a case for the importance of political myth in The Myth of the State because he is concerned with its first major manifestation in Nazi Germany and the book was published posthumously in 1946 immediately at the end of the war. His strong major arguments for the permanence of myth in culture suggest that myth is essential in postmythical societies. "For every feature of our human experience has a claim to reality" (EM 77). The need for myth is the need for a basis of feeling and images associated with them, Cassirer would argue. These may operate in the depths of more rational thought processes—an idea suggested by Verene ("Cassirer's Concept of Symbolic Form" 21). For the support of the people the program of the state must "enter the memories and imagination of the

244

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

citizens and live as a set of passions and feelings as well as thoughts" ("Cassirer's Political Philosophy" 32). In general, as Strenski pointed out, myth is the basis of the feeling of nationhood ("Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought in Weimar Culture" 365). Cassirer expresses this view when he discusses Schelling and the German romantic nationalists in that volume. Cassirer believes myth is necessary in politics insofar as it makes the life of many individuals into a community stronger than and prior to any consensus. This modern "solidarity of life" is still an emotional one necessary to give the possible rational political arguments their full human significance. Myth is a force of tradition, making a community continuous with the past and giving a cultural identity to a people and having a role in the constitution of ideals growing out of the past experience. Some Mythical Features of Modern Politics in General As Cassirer explicitly claims, divination or telling the future was a part of primitive cultures and is still a part of the modern, though the methods are different—they must have a technical air (MS 289). Micchael J. Arlen describes the technical style of mythical thinking, the new rationalized myths in an article called "The Air," which applies Cassirer's ideas on the modern myths to specific political figures and events. A description of the harmless but also thoughtless style is the following: our leaders are centrist and affable instead of evil and totalitarian; our myths of leadership are modest and unassuming (not Lincolnesque, not even Kennedyesque) instead of grandiose and Wagnerian; our mythmakers are no longer remote and sinister Svengali figures but down-to-earth professionals, laden with polls and samplings. The only thing that seems to have stayed the same, as it were, is that 'rationalized myth' has become so much a part of our political life that we take its presence for granted—not merely in political propaganda (or advertising) but in the news" (253).

He describes how the media present politics only on a mythic level— through images and emotional scenes, not through logical discussion of the issues (253). Not mentioned by Arlen is the fact that even when there is a televised debate it resembles a TV Quiz show which is a type of contest and the comments by the TV announcers always concern who is winning, not what the best political ideas might be. Arlen does describe the Reagan campaign for presidency in this way. He alludes to the idea of a

Myth Affects Modern Life

245

"presidential image" commonly thought to be a chief factor deciding an election; it also is the chief subject of political discussion. The logic of advertisements has followed a similar evolution from being more logical but less powerful to being less logical but more powerful. MODERN MYTH OUTSIDE POLITICS Cassirer's theory does suggest many ways in which myth continues to shape modern life outside politics. The role of myth in personal and social life has already been pointed out. "In social life, in our daily intercourse with men, we cannot efface these data [of feeling or emotion]" (EM 77). Myths would be at work in some portions of the population living a traditional life even today. Often the uneducated or lower economic levels cling to popular beliefs and explanations. Other portions of society can seek new myths or scientific explanations. Robert Segal discusses a similar view by Campbell (JC 78). Cassirer even suggests that what constitutes a myth is in postmythical societies relative to other conceptions; certain stages of science are mythical with respect to future ones yet more scientific than previous ones. Similarly, within a culture, the popular beliefs would be mythical in relation to the science of the day yet would be more advanced than the myths of previous generations. Myths are at work in fundamental beliefs about reality. Cassirer writes, "It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined, but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology" (PSF II, 5). The psychologist Rollo May cites this statement in The Cry for Myth and explains it through an example of Christopher Columbus, whose history-making voyage would not have been possible if it had not been for a change in myths by the Renaissance (92). A new spirit of confidence in human ability, a new sense of finding out through experience, and a new love of nature prepare the way for actual voyages. On Cassirer's view, myth is always needed to rejuvenate culture. Modern artists feel a strange power in it (SMC 188). Myth renews literature and language by forging new expressions for feelings previously not self-conscious (LH 199). Metaphors are sometimes points of change in the language. The preservation of culture also requires its renewal in successive generations (MS 39). Myth seems to recur in cycles of higher levels of mind, an idea already discussed in the chapter on the recurrence of myth. Immediate perception seems to perennially pass through a mythical stage before it catches up to the more modern existing abstract notions in the culture:

246

Cassirer and Langer on Myth Indeed, even the world of our immediate experience—that world in which all of us constantly live and are when not engaged in conscious, critical-scientific reflection—contains any number of traits which, from the standpoint of this same reflection, can only be designated as mythical—most particularly, the concept of causality, the general concept of force, which must pass through the mythical intuition of efficacy before dissolving in the mathematical-logical concept of the function. Thus everywhere, down to the configuration of our perceptive world, down to that sphere which from the naive standpoint we designate as actual 'reality', we find this characteristic survival of original mythical traits (PSF II, 14).

This role of mythical traits in immediate perception and personal life would be a transitory phase leading to a more advanced understanding and also a partial one limited to experiences outside one's professional life or already established modern ideas. Myth seems to be essential when there is an understanding of the meaning of life. One dimension of life's significance is feeling, subjective orientation and purpose. On Cassirer's view, myth builds up wholistic conceptions of the universe—one reason why it is needed in modern technological society which fragments life into various techniques and separates itself sharply from traditional customs. The meaning of life is dependent upon a conception of personal identity, which myths institute at the same time. Robert Segal expresses the interdependence in the following way: If literally a hero discovers a strange external world, symbolically, or psychologically, he discovers a strange internal one. Literally, the hero discovers that there is more to the world than the physical world. Symbolically, he discovers that there is more to him than his consciousness. Literally, the hero discovers the ultimate nature of the world. Symbolically, he discovers his own ultimate nature. He discovers his true identity. He discovers who he really is (JC 5).

Of course, the modern person may partially identify with many different heros in different contexts—work, religion, romance, family relations. Cassirer finds myth at work in the mass thinking brought about by industrialism, the media, and mass communications. Fascism is an extreme negative version of mass thinking, but the same type of cultural phenomenon is evident in mass culture. Cassirer discusses this issue in

Myth Affects Modern Life

247

"Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth Century Ethics," an essay partly on the collective spirit of the twentieth century (243, 254-55). Cassirer agrees with Schweitzer that the "collective body" should not "work more strongly in the individual than the latter does upon it" (243). This conclusion calls to mind Cassirer's theory of the rise of ethics from the mythical worldview. Cassirer does not apply his theory of myth any further than these general suggestions; however, his theory influenced the ideas of others— mainly, those of Susanne K. Langer, which will be discussed in the next chapters. NOTES 1 This is the view of Franz Elieser Meyer in Ernst Cassirer and Hendel in PSF III, ix, and the view can be found in Verene's and Krois' writings and the present author's dissertation on Cassirer. 2 See MS 298: "The [mythical monsters] were used for the creation of a new universe, and they still survive in this universe." In other passages already quoted in this study, Cassirer states that myth becomes modified in more advanced thinking or subordinated yet not eradicated. 3 Cited in "German Philosophy and National Socialism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, p. 315. 4 Cited in Verene's "Cassirer's Political Philosophy," 18. 5 TLS, July 7, 1995, p. 25. 6 See Verene's discussion of this issue in "Cassirer's Political Philosophy " 30. 7 See "Controversial Book on Holocaust Is Published in German Today," Athens News, Tues. 6 Aug. 1996, p. 4. The article follows the publication of the German translation of the original and the nature of the public outrage against the study. 8 Cited and translated by Strenski in "Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought," 365. 9 From p. 112 and 188-89 of That Other Self, Iliopoulos. Also see James Olney, The Rhizome and the Flower: The Perennial

Philosophy—Yeats

and Jung, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980, 175 note. 10 In note 4 on p. 288 of MS, Cassirer cites Stephen Raushenbush's March of Fascism, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1939, p. 40. 11 This comment appeared in a catalog description of Myth and Meaning for The Philosopher's Bookshelf and on the dust cover of the book by Schocken.

This page intentionally left blank

PART II

Myth in Langer's Philosophy of Human Feeling

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 10

Myth in Langer's Life and Career The Quest for the Roots of Myth ". . . to be presented with a thinker's conclusions, not really seeing the path whereby he [or she] reached them, or knowing the first suggestion—the insight or naive perception—which opened that path, is unsatisfactory to anyone whose philosophical interest is more than skin deep'' (LM vii).

. .. This chapter discusses the path whereby Susanne Langer developed her theory of myth, a path which has aroused much academic interest and takes as its main point of departure the philosophy of Cassirer—how much it takes from his views and how much it departs will be questions guiding the following discussion. The path of development of her ideas is very important; like a flower the final blossoming of which depends on the soil, the weather, and other conditions such as the position of sunlight, Langer's theory of myth is a result of her intellectual growth through a lifetime. Unusual is her degree of success in the field of philosophy in the middle part of the twentieth century. Traditionally, it, like science, was a field for men, even more so than in the field of literature or of other humanities. And, unusual is the popularity of her work, with her main work Philosophy in a New Key becoming a best seller in its day, the biggest money-maker for Harvard University Press, selling well more than 500,000 copies, and it is still selling, being taught in university classrooms in several fields. In these two respects, her path differs from that of Cassirer, whose work while highly acclaimed cannot be called popular in the sense of mass appeal, though the interest is growing steadily, continuously; his appeal could be called "classical" by contrast. On the other hand, Cassirer's life and work is more unusual insofar as it is affected by sharp turning points, no doubt having an effect on his ideas. Whereas he just barely escapes with his life and family from his native Nazi Germany, travels to several countries, and finally ends up in America where he writes very successfully in his new language, Langer 251

252

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

grows up in America and fortunately escapes some of the dramatic encounters with the mythical barbarism in modern society. Instead of being socially dislocated, a process that made Cassirer's career into something like the journey of a hero, Langer was very much following a conventional academic and social path, marrying an historian who would become the assistant director of the CIA. In such preparatory reflections on Langer's whole career, however, the similarities with that of Cassirer are more striking. Both were born to German parents, both parents were wealthy, and both early family environments encouraged a child to excel in cultural pursuits. Both children excelled at an early age. Both philosophers placed an unprecedented importance on myth as a philosophical topic, not to mention the way in which this was done, that is, through a common interest in the symbolic nature of all human knowledge. Both had the same intellectual style of referring to a quite large number of researches in other fields, and this practice was and is unique in philosophy. Perhaps, Langer adopts much of her intellectual style from Cassirer. These similarities would seem to indicate that their philosophies would be received by the public in the same way, but this is not entirely true. Despite the fame and respect in both cases, Cassirer's life work was given, whether by design or not, an easily identifiable name by which people could understand that it was his, almost like the brand name of a product. Having this seemingly minor feature helps to promote the theory as original, according to the Princeton sociologist Michele Lamont in her article "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida."1 In addition, the fact that Langer was a woman writing before the feminist movement of the 1960s may have helped to shape the public impression of her contribution. If her gender and her times kept her from being recognized as much as her work warranted or as equal to Cassirer's, the fact that she wrote about aesthetic matters rather than scientific would be accepted as a pursuit at which a woman could traditionally excel. On the basis of these points of convergence and divergence of careers, it should be noted the main diverging tendency in the growth of their ideas. Whereas Cassirer wrote little about art in the main works published in his life time, though recently published posthumous works show his intention of correcting this deficiency, Langer tended to balance her mentor's preoccupation with science by developing her main ideas in the philosophy of art. For this reason, in "Symbol according to Cassirer and Langer,"

Myth in Langer's Life and Career

253

William Van Roo considers their philosophies to be "complementary contributions," meaning that each contributes ideas on subjects that the other does not (615). Langer's career tendency and preferred subject matter are significant for her theory of myth: unlike Cassirer's it becomes defined more through a theory of art and her work is generally recognized for its new ideas in this area. A survey of scholarly articles would support this observation, as would almost every dictionary or biographical article which begins with a kind of career epitaph, "aesthetician," or "philosopher of art." How this tendency affects her definition of myth will become evident; for now, a general characterization of the relation of art to myth can be offered from her essay "End of an Epoch."2 Since art starts each new epoch, art is the main fountainhead of culture, and this statement may lead many a reader to interpret it to mean that myth as in a famous child's story is a kind of ugly duckling that eventually turns into the beautiful swan, art. I think this comparison is slightly exaggerating her greater valorization of art, not to mention her occasional, explicit declarations of the equality of cultural fields—particularly the equality of art to others. What is valuable about this brief attempt to position myth in relation to art, before a thorough discussion, is to contrast it with Cassirer's idea about the relation; for him, it is more true that myth would be the fountain, ever new in each age, from which art and other cultural fields would find new ground to grow in. These remarks are in agreement with those of Van Roo when he answers the question, Why Cassirer and Langer? Each has done a serious, impressive work on symbol. Together their works offer not just an introduction to, but a rather full elaboration of, a theory of symbol or symbolic form. Cassirer indicated a wide range of symbolic forms, and worked out his theory in the areas of myth, language, and scientific thought. Langer's theory of art complements Cassirer's work. Inspired in great part by Cassirer, she has worked out a theory of art forms which Cassirer often indicated but never elaborated (487).

I would like to add that her development of new ideas on art leads her to shift the meaning of myth from what Cassirer understood. Could it be that Cassirer's emphasis on science was not a radical enough departure from the traditional emphasis of epistemology on nature and that Langer, whether following her conventional gender predisposition or not, rightly built upon his views by interpreting myth in the broader light of a

254

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

knowledge more consistent with the other humanities and arts? If this is true, how does she do this? THE FORMATIVE YEARS AND EARLY WORK BEFORE PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY (1895-1942) Her early family life, as was Cassirer's, was especially conducive to cultural pursuits. Born to a well-to-do lawyer, and raised in the Manhattan German colony with its active cultural life, she learned to play the cello and piano quite well, continuing to play the cello throughout her life and probably being an early formative influence for her later theory of music. She was a purist in many ways; in music she hated "canned" music through radios or even speakers. Her early sickness due to poisoning by cocaine, improperly filled by a pharmacist (it was legal in the U.S. at the first part of the twentieth century), forced her to have private tutors at home and may have contributed to the habits of a scholarly life and a tendency toward original thinking.3 Certainly her philosophical emphasis on art has a deep strong personal background which may have lead her to the contemplative life in the first place. She and her mother shared an interest in poetry, and as a teenager reading on her own she already reveals her unusually strong interests, "I read Little Women and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason simultaneously."4 Her family situation prepared the way for an excellent education in her day, especially if it is remembered that few women attended universities and very few received the Ph.D. in the first decades of the twentieth century. After receiving her degrees from Radcliffe, she became a tutor in philosophy there, marrying William Leonard Langer in 1921, a professor of history at Harvard, and in this situation she had the opportunity to become influenced by the great English mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who taught at Harvard for many years. This early mentorship and friendship led her to study symbolic logic and to publish an acclaimed book in the field (1937). This influence was also present in her Practice of Philosophy (1930), in which she states a type of approach to philosophical method based on the clarification of meanings. It is important to notice that Whitehead published Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect in 1927, just three years before her Practice of Philosophy. Although it does not yet present her original ideas, it does manifest an emphasis on the value of using arguments as in symbolic logic in contrast to the dialectical type of thinking used more in Cassirer's most original ideas; in the much later work Philosophical Sketches (1962) she is to criticize Cassirer for not clarifying the theory of symbolism more.

Myth in Langer''s Life and Career

255

Many articles on Langer's early life report that she was a "student" also of Cassirer; however, this is only true in the general sense that she studied his works deeply. It was only some months before her publication of her main and first original work Philosophy in a New Key (1942) that she met briefly with Cassirer at a conference in the U.S.5 That work shows how deeply she must have been reading the German philosopher's works for years. It was obvious to both Cassirer and his wife Toni that her work was developing along very similar lines (Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer). THE FIRST CREATIVE PERIOD: DOING PHILOSOPHY IN "THE NEW KEY" BASED ON A THEORY OF SYMBOLISM This period begins with Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942), dedicated to Whitehead, author of Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. Even in this first work, the unusually detailed table of contents reminds the reader more of Cassirer's first original work Substance and Function rather than Whitehead's. Additional thinkers are said by Langer to belong to a new climate of theory which places symbolism at the center of human nature, including Charles Sanders Peirce, often called the forerunner of modern semiotics, and Sigmund Freud, who also wrote about the "symbolic" nature of ideas and their unconscious undercurrents, which he believes is in some ways mythical or "primitive." Langer's idea that all knowledge is a kind of "symbolic transformation" of sensory stimuli removes the prejudice of epistemology toward science and allows other human activities to be called knowledge equally. In this respect Langer attempts to develop an idea started by Cassirer much further in an increasingly different direction—eventually toward the theory of art which he did not write. Whereas Cassirer builds his philosophy on the belief that there are different worlds of space, time, and physical qualities which human beings have constructed, Langer extends the idea more to the different domains of culture, to music, art, religion, and myth. In the year of this publication her life entered a new key as well. She became divorced from her husband and stopped being a tutor at Radicliffe. She taught for a year at the University of Delaware and from 1945 to 1950 at Columbia. Philosophy in a New Key is unique in many ways. Few works in philosophy covered such a range of topics, nor did they discuss the new emerging issues in the developing social sciences and humanities. It is a general theory of symbolism providing the basic assumptions for the rest

256

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

of her career. At that time symbolism is a very original topic; one might almost call it avant-garde, except for some occasional negative connotations of undisciplined experimentalism that the term can carry with it. Her work is anything but undisciplined, loose, vague thinking. The work states its foundation clearly; she challenges two basic assumptions: (1) that language is the only means of articulating thought, and (2) that everything which is not speakable thought is feeling. . . . I believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other than discursive language.6

Although Cassirer would not disagree with these new ideas, his theory of myth usually develops its main new ideas through the mythical knowledge of nature: categories of space, time, number, and cause. Langer tries to shift the emphasis of the theory of knowledge by examining more specifically cultural phenomena such as are indicated in the subtitle: "A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art." In the various chapters she defines myth through language (Chapter V), sacrament (in VI), myths (in VII), music (in VIII), and art (in IX). Not only her explicit topics, but also the language she uses shows her attempt to explain myth on a more prediscursive, prelinguistic level than Cassirer had attempted. Three years after her first main work, she published a translation of Cassirer's Language and Myth (1945). In the Translator's Preface she indicates its thesis: "Professor Cassirer's great thesis, based on the evidence of language and verified by his sources with quite thrilling success, is that [the] philosophy of mind involves much more than a theory of knowledge; it involves a theory of prelogical conception and expression, and their final culmination in reason and factual knowledge." In 1949 she wrote more "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth," in The Library of Living Philosophers; the tone is not one of disagreement but one of continued support. She points out their difference in emphasis: "what originally led him to this problem [of the relation of language to myth] was not the contemplation of poetry, but of science" (Schlipp 383). What leads Langer to this problem—so she would like to think—is the contemplation of the arts. Poetry and the other arts lead Langer to this and other problems by the indirect way of a change in a

Myth in Langer's Life and Career

257

general orientation toward knowledge, namely, the new idea that it does not only consist in true or false relations and references to the physical world. Therefore, the meaning of myth and that of language are not confined to their truth values, their correspondence to the physical world. Without a doubt Langer does not deny that part of the meaning of myth and language is to refer to the physical world; it is just that she would like to emphasize other legitimate aspects of their meaning which she and a few other philosophers feel had been neglected. Another equally important function of knowledge, neglected by philosophy, is the function of the mind just to distinguish, emphasize, and hold the object while giving it a human feeling; this function of knowledge, called hypostatic, does not judge the object; it makes it, it relates it to our human concerns. This idea of Langer's (and Cassirer's especially in Language and Myth) can be clarified by etymology. Consistent with her idea that the arts make an object rather than refer it to the world, and that this is prior to any reference, is the linguistic fact that words for making and for the arts have their roots in the ancient Greek word for poetry, which also means "making." Even nonpoetic, even nonmythical language depends for its meaning upon prediscursive feelings, just as the waking mind depends upon unconscious feelings. She is not a mystic who would like to deny conventional meanings for art and myth altogether; in contrast she would like to add to them some new ideas that would help to explain the unusual nature or art and myth. They are something different from ordinary conversation and from the clear thoughts of symbolic logic. With such different goals in epistemology, the differences in their theories of myth would develop in 1953 with the publication of her theory of art. She developed it in the period from 1945 to 1950 when she was teaching at Columbia University, had a Rockefeller Grant, and was preoccupied with Cassirer's ideas of the relation of language and myth. LANGER'S SECOND MAIN PERIOD: A THEORY OF ART IN FEELING AND FORM If her first period is characterized by general, wide-sweeping concerns with symbolism, this period is concerned with a specific development of that foundation, culminating in Feeling and Form in 1953 and including Problems of Art (1957). While dedicated to Cassirer, it marks a greater departure from Cassirer's philosophy because she develops what Cassirer suggested in principle could and should be done: a theory of art

258

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

based on the idea of the symbolic nature of all knowledge, that it uses symbols of different kinds, and the different kinds are equal complementary ways of building human nature. She declares herself to be a follower and developer of his ideas—at moments throughout her life when she reflects on her starting points. The book's title is also its thesis: any human feeling, even that presented in other forms than language, has a form to it. For example, sculpture presents a human feeling in the broad sense of a disposition toward an entire world. Discussing various arts in quite detail, Langer not only defines art to be a form of feeling, each art creating its forms in different ways, but also she is concerned with the materials and methods of the symbolism, and this concern is new in the history of philosophy. Her kind of idealism, milder or less dialectical than Cassirer's, may seem more empirical than that of many empiricists if the quantity of references to empirical studies is taken into consideration. To illustrate her approach there are the contrasting aesthetic works of Immanuel Kant, for example, which she became aware of when she was a teenager, which are more judgmental and theoretical and lack references to artworks. Her writing is characterized by many references through which she presents the manner of creating because it helps her to define the recurring objective nature of art. Artistic symbols cohere in patterns of meaning, like a figure woven in a carpet, and although the specific patterns may change, the manner of making the patterns remains more constant than meets the untrained eye. If it did not, then art would have little or no regularity and not be a proper subject of epistemology. Like scientific laws, which state that certain regular relationships among possible phenomena can actually take place, art has stylistic laws, which state that certain regular relationships among feelings have their constant forms in the structure of a poem or whatever art. Besides having regularity in structure or form, art can only be a way of knowing if it reveals something new about reality— the reality of the processes of human feeling always in relation to some specific actual situation. She is interested in showing that art is meaningful by showing how the meaning is made. Her original tendencies in aesthetics lead the way also in her theory of myth. When she discusses myth, the manner of making it is important. The message of a myth cannot be understood without knowing how it is made and how the process fits into other cognitive processes in a total life. Some speculative reconstruction is necessary to think as the artist or primitive must have thought, based upon all the empirical evidence, the actual works and studies on them. Without any such reconstructive spec-

Myth in Langer 's Life and Career

259

ulation the interpretations of myth and art would just be modern ones, not ones by the original creators. What is interesting in studies on myth and art is the discovery of the way a different mind works, and by this knowledge to learn more about analogous abilities in our modern way of thinking. Langer's thinking is careful enough that it is meaningful, that is, that its value is evident. Essential to her theory of artistic creation are the differences in the arts: she calls them "primary illusions" meaning primary ways in which the imagination works in art. The variety of ways illustrates and supports her theory. She argues against the idea that art is merely play because it is not referential to the physical world: the quality of music or painting or other arts does not depend upon its correspondence to actual sounds, images, or things. Instead, the meaning of the arts depends on the unity of the human act of its production. The arts show some of the unity of our human culture. The obverse way of expressing this idea is to say that the work of art must have its appropriate unity and laws of style. To this extent art is objective, not merely subjective, and so it can be the object of epistemology. The art work is not a mere expression of a personal feeling but a person's discovery of the form and function of feelings, usually through some other means than direct, literal language. A film is moving and good not because it gives the audience the emotions it is watching; rather it shows them the form in which the emotions are created and resolved, as a family coat of arms indicates an entire ethos and history without causing the viewers to have that ethos. The book's title also means that human feeling differs from that of other animals; humans project it outward in the act of creating artifacts and language and performing customs as a basis of self-consciousness and its condition of the ability to generalize and abstract experience even into new imaginary creations. This work differs more from those of Cassirer's than Langer's previous works, even though she again attributes the origin to Cassirer (Mind I, xv). The topics chosen and the language concerning feelings are original. Ironically, this work becomes more like those of Cassirer in the limited sense that it is more academic, less popular. While the examples are rich in details, the terms become multiplied and have technical and nonconventional meanings. She actually coins more technical terms than Cassirer, though this does not mean she has a greater number of original ideas, nor a greater degree of originality. The theory of myth is only a subordinate albeit important original

260

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

part of this work: it shows the origin of the arts. Especially in Chapter 12, "The Magic Circle," Langer discusses myth so as to present her idea of the nature of dance through its evolution. In primitive society the sense of a mind, self-conscious only through feelings of personal will and physical power, becomes objectified in dance. Then in an unintended unconscious way they show the dancer the mind's processes, enabling it to become changed or adapted, even later by generalization to other actions of life besides the dance. Nevertheless, Feeling and Form is important for Langer's theory of myth. Langer discusses aspects of mythical consciousness which Cassirer does not. She concentrates on the prediscursive workings of the mind, the feelings, which can be the object of study because they produce outward art objects, customs, myths, and language. If there is some kind of lawfulness to those human creations, then they are as serious and as important to human beings as science is. Langer is correcting the previous prejudice of epistemology toward science. The result for her interpretation of myth is that myth becomes something more than a mere "theory" about an external environment; it is interpreted as an organ of self-knowledge and therefore self-development—unintentional though it must surely have been. As such, myth is inherently evolutionary in Langer's theory. This conclusion is important for the view that myth is not just a creation in a period of unfortunate delusion. Myth can be a legitimate topic of epistemology, and it may evolve into new forms still extant today. Rathern than falsifying Cassirer's definition of myth, based more on the creation of the natural world through mythical space, time, and number, Langer attempts to deepen and broaden it, based more on the creation of a cultural world through art works, religious rites, and many others. In so doing she believes the modern mind can put itself in the place of the working primitive or artistic or religious mind more fully. PHILOSOPHICAL SKETCHES (1962) AND MYTH IN MODERN LIFE Twenty years earlier in the final chapter of Philosophy in a New Key called "The Fabric of Meaning" Langer applies her new ideas about symbolism to modern life. It has developed so fast and so far from its mythical background that it lacks some of its features that are important for human beings; namely, religious values called "sacra," ritual actions involving a sense of the performance of an overall meaning to life, and

Myth in Langer's Life and Career

261

generally fixed values and a sense of belonging to a place and a people. One extreme example of the undesirable lack of what is positive in myth is the reemergence of what is negative in it: new mythologies have barbarous effects, the most obvious example being the manufactured propaganda myths of the Nazis. Cassirer also was writing about this topic during the same time period—he not only wrote about it, he experienced the barbarism as an expatriated Jew. Also, the British philosopher R.G. Collingwood and the German Karl Jaspers were others who wrote about the barbarism of some kinds of myth in modern life. A few of the best writers began to use this theme in their works. Philosophical Sketches is a curious collection of essays in which practical moral issues of modern society follow theoretical reflections on the nature of symbols, speech, and art. In her essay "On a New Definition of 'Symbol' " she criticizes Cassirer's view for being unintelligible to logicians and philosophers of science. The implication is that she would like to clarify his theory of myth and the symbol. In this work she only announces the need for this development to be fulfilled in her final publications beginning five years later. The importance of the work for the theory of myth is that the originality of her ideas about symbols becomes clearer. The work of art is "a symbol of feeling, for, like a [discursive] symbol" it formulates our idea of inward experience, as discourse formulates our ideas of things and facts in the outside world. A work of art differs from a genuine symbol—that is, a symbol in the full and usual sense— in that it does not point beyond itself to something else. Its relation to feeling is a rather special one that we cannot undertake to analyze here; in effect, the feeling it expresses appears to be directly given with it— as the sense of a true metaphor, or the value of a religious myth—and is not separable from its expression. We speak of the feeling of or the feeling in, a work of art, not the feeling it means. And we speak truly; a work of art presents something like a direct vision of vitality, emotion, subjective reality (90).

On Langer's view art is formal. Art makes the structure of human feeling perceptible; it does not make people have the feelings expressed through it, in the manner of pornography. The perception of the structure in human feeling gives the artist and the public pleasure. Though she does not state the reason, it seems consistent with what she does say to conclude that the pleasure comes from the realization of the mind's own

262

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

power, consisting in both the satisfaction with the discovery of an appropriate harmonious expression of the self and the satsfaction with new knowledge about the self, as there is pleasure felt when anyone exercises a developed skill, whether in sports or other fields, or there is pleasure felt when the body fulfills its nature as in the euphoria of the long-distance runner. Such explanations on behalf of Langer help to show how art is a form of knowledge in the full sense that science is, no matter how different in type the two are—a conclusion that remains controversial. Langer's approach to art has a significant, direct application to the theory of myth. She uses the term "feeling" to mean more than the psychological states of happiness or sadness and so on; it includes all awareness of subjective condition, including for example the sense of power or right or beauty or holiness, and the qualities of subjective condition are the basis of all the human abstractions such as freedom, love, goodness, and so on. To some extent her aesthetics is an archaeology of aesthetics which has significance for art today insofar as it reveals a deep biological foundation for human ideas. In this total project, myth becomes redefined to be a transitory, yet recurring stage to art, and a perennial, yet evolving manner of making new feelings, on the threshold of the somatic and the spiritual, the animal and the human, the sensory and the symbolic. These essays are preliminary to a complete theory of the evolution of the human mind worked out in her three-volume treatise. THE FINAL PERIOD OF HER PHILOSOPHY: THE THEORY OF THE EVOLUTION OF MIND Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, published in three volumes (1967, 1972, 1982), attempts to clarify Cassirer's idea of the symbolic basis of human culture; it unites many disparate topics of research in previous works by Langer, the most important of which are myth and art; and it deepens her previous studies into the nature of human feeling. The treatise's subtitle shows that the work does not disavow her previous work. Indeed, in 1953 in Feeling and Form she hoped the book would be the beginning of an intellectual pursuit capable of infinite duration (xii). Her interests in that theory of art are developed through all her subsequent works and, ironically, her last major work became so all-encompassing that her impending poor health due to old age forced her to curtail it, to curtail a life-long ambition of explaining how art is equal to science. The desire is reflected in what must seem like a curious title to people not ac-

Myth in Langer's Life and Career

263

quainted with her previous works: the title seems to reverse the common sense priority of mind and feeling. Conventionally, mind is superior, being rational and the source of true knowledge, and so feeling is an inferior type or by product of it, not being a true source of knowledge and even leading the mind astray. Repeating her indebtedness to Cassirer in her introduction, she defines her originality mainly as an advanced development of his ideas. Her

tone is no more false modesty than it is an admission of a lack of originality. The acknowledgments express honest intellectual affiliation, helping the reader to understand how to interpret the ideas while also claiming to belong in a group of thinkers of a high calibre. What is even more important than the way she herself regards her originality, though, is that her attempt at a monumental philosophy differs from that of Cassirer in two ways. First of all, she claims the change from animal mentality to human mentality is much more continuous than Cassirer or any other philosopher realized. The central problem of the present essay is the nature and origin of the veritable gulf that divides human from animal mentality, in a perfectly continuous course of development of life on earth that has no breaks. . . . The thesis I am about to develop here is that his [the human's] departure from the normal pattern of animal mentality is a vast and special evolution of feeling in the hominid stock. This deviation from the general balance of functions usually maintained in the complex advances of life, is so rich and so intricately detailed that it affects every aspect of human nature apart from the rest of the animal kingdom as a mode of being that is typified by language, culture, morality, and consciousness of life and death (Mind I, xvi-xvii and ff).

Although Cassirer's initial speculations led him eventually to study the empirical research on the difference between humans and animals twenty years after his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms in a work which was also its summary, called An Essay on Man, Langer will also use researches from the empirical sciences but for a different purpose: she aims to discover the continuity of animal and human: she aims to find the biological basis of human intelligence. Cassirer emphasizes the gap; Langer, the continuity. Once found, the basis would explain the origin of myth as well as the contemporary basis of mind in feeling. The previous emphasis on feeling shifts from an interest in art to a more comprehensive research interest

264

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

including biology. Just as she found the basis for the forms in art and myth in feeling, she now attempts to find the basis for feeling in neurological processes. She would like to "conceive mind as a natural phenomenon." She would like to make Cassirer's conclusions more "scientific," more analytical and more fully explained. She does not want to claim that Cassirer starts in the wrong way or fundamentally is in error. Her theory will redirect and overlay his, undoubtedly with some benefits. One feature of this project calls to mind an important assumption Cassirer made about the philosophy of myth. If myth were to be intelligible to the modern mind, if it were not to be completely different from our intelligence, then something in myth must have contributed to the project of humanity which we are still engaged in. We are humans, we can understand human nature more than anything else, and the first creators of myth were humans. Similarly, Langer believes something in animal life, that is, in the hominids, must have provided the biological shift to human mentality, and this basis would still be at work today. We are also animals, we can also understand our animal nature more than that of other animals, and the first creators of myth shared some of our animal traits. Langer seems to think that the common basis of modern mind and the primitive may be more evident in their biological processes than in their cultural works, as different as we like to regard them. Mind generalizes Feeling and Form while clarifying Cassirer's idea of symbolic intelligence by defining it as having an identifiable difference from the animal in biological functioning. In general, the final main work by Langer will raise the issue of her differences with Cassirer on the subject of myth in a new way: it will concern the possible basis of a theory of the origin of the mythical consciousness and human intelligence. Can there be a "physical cause" of human ideas? What would this mean? It is common for humanists to reject the causal relation of race and personality. New ideas in genetics and artificial intelligence, however, raise the possibility of a physical cause for many human ideas. Surely, philosophers should not close their eyes to the empirical research on the mind, and neither Cassirer or Langer are idealists in that sense, but how far can mind be considered a physical process? Or, is this problem confused by the difference in theoretical aims of philosophy and biology? They both seem to speak of the same thing, mind, and we must relate all different views into one system of reality, but they may be different independent threads, woven in different directions to produce a

Myth in Langer's Life and Career

265

total pattern known as the modern world. In that case, there would be limits to the explanation of philosophy in terms of biology, the mind in terms of the body, the cultural creator in terms of the animal homo sapiens.

CONCLUSION ABOUT THE ROLE OF THE THEORY OF MYTH IN HER ENTIRE CAREER Myth plays a less central role in the philosophy of Langer than it does in that of Cassirer. True enough, it is a concern throughout her career and she believes it is a necessary part of philosophy. The quantity of writing on myth is less, as is the number of original concepts explaining myth. In Cassirer's philosophy the relationship of myth to all other cultural activities is more explicit. Perhaps Langer assumes the truth of some of Cassirer's work and so her theory takes the shape it does as a further development. The main feature of her whole career's treatment of myth is that she attempts to find a "deeper" origin of myth in each succeeding work. At least for the sake of convenient synopsis, her theory of myth has three main stages. Beginning with an interest in prediscursive symbolism (1942) she proceeds to an interest in feeling (1953) and finally to the biological basis of feeling (1967 and later). At each stage, she pushes Cassirer's definition of myth further into animal intelligence than he did. She also is more willing to discuss the possibility of mental states as direct products of corresponding physical changes. Nevertheless, she admits the problem of explaining human nature to be a better, "higher" animal; human nature is still fundamentally different such that some categories of explanation are new and do not apply to the former stage of evolution. She knows there must be limits to a biological explanation of cultural phenomena. The writings of a biologically oriented anthropologist such as Desmond Morris in The Naked Ape and other writings, in which customs can be explained entirely in terms of biological adaptation, exceed Langer's implicit bounds. In the following chapters the change in her understanding of myth throughout her career will be followed in more detail so that its meaning is explained more fully and some conclusion can be drawn about its success and its contribution to future theories of myth.

266

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

NOTES 1 The American Journal of Sociology, 93(1987): 584-622. 2 The Atlantic Monthly, 147(1931), 772-775. 3 From the obituary by William R. Greer, The New York Times, Friday July 19, 1985. 4 Current Biography 1963, Ed. Charles Moritz, N.Y.: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1963, 233. The original source is an interview with Winthrop Sargeant for The New Yorker (December 3, 1960). 5 Verene clarifies the fact in "Symbolic Form," 292. The first meeting is reported by Cassirer's wife, Toni, in the untranslated biography, Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer ("My Life with Ernst Cassirer"), 314-15. 6 See the obituary by William Green in The New York Times.

CHAPTER 11

Myth Is in "a New Key" A Type of Symbolism Like Art and Music "The origin of myth is dynamic, but its purpose is philosophical. It is the primitive phase of metaphysical thought, the first embodiment of general ideas. It can do no more than initiate and present them; for it is a non-discursive symbolism, it does not lend itself to analytic and genuinely abstractive techniques. The highest development of which myth is capable is the exhibition of human life and cosmic order that epic poetry reveals. We cannot abstract and manipulate its concepts any further within the mythical mode. When this mode is exhausted, natural religion is superseded by a discursive and more literal form of thought, namely philosophy" (PNK 201).

Without a doubt Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942) is the most well-known work of Langer, having sold well over 500,000 copies and described as the all-time best seller of Harvard University Press. Ironically, despite the far greater commercial success, a measure of popularity, even influence, Cassirer's works have been referred to far more in scholarly publications in many fields. The seminal work marks the beginning of her career as an original philosopher, when Cassirer—whom she called "that pioneer in the philosophy of symbolism"—was teaching and writing in the U.S. in the last five years of his life (PNK xv). Langer's work represents what can be called the first generation of thinkers influenced by his work; perhaps Langer is influenced the most obviously, though there are others whose work is very close to Cassirer's in many ways such as that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but who does not have a theory of myth. The role of a theory of myth in an entire philosophy can affect it very much, and the roles in Cassirer's and Langer's differ considerably. In this work and in her whole philosophy, it is regarded less as 267

268

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

proto-science, as it was for Cassirer, and more as proto-art. Also, it is discussed less, or perhaps it merely seems to be the case because fewer new terms she coins are derived from myth than is the case in Cassirer's philosophy. In the 300 pages of Philosophy in a New Key there are ninety pages on myth and ritual and magic, or about thirty percent. These pages read very much like Cassirer's theory despite the differences which will be discussed; the strong impression of originality given by the book comes from its discussion of music—an unprecedented subject in philosophy—and the new role of importance given to art, alongside that of language, religion, and science, the latter of which is not discussed and is so only in a few pages at the end of her life, whereas Cassirer devoted thousands of pages to science. The proportion of topics would indicate that Langer is attempting to correct the imbalance of Cassirer's epistemologa its undue emphasis on science as knowledge or the model of knowledge. If this is done, and if there is a stronger desire to discuss types of symbolism that are not discursive (analytical) as science is, then there is a greater recognition of the plurality of types of symbolism and myth occupies a place as one among the many—the first, it is true, yet the first to be discussed on the way to discussing the others which Cassirer does not very much: "Language, ritual, myth, and music, representing four respective modes, may serve as central topics for the study of actual symbolisms; and I trust that further problems of significance in art, in science or mathematics, in behavior or in fantasy and dream, may receive some light by analogy, and by that most powerful human gift, the adaptation of ideas" (PNK 102). The structure of the book shows the tendency of her thought, even in future works. The use of a musical metahpor shows the new emphasis on the types of symbolism other than those of science. The first four chapters are devoted to the theoretical foundation: I. The New Key, II. Symbolic Transformation, III. The Logic of Signs and Symbols, and IV. Discursive Forms and Presentational Forms. Then the subject areas of the new philosophy begin with Chapter V. Language, in which its rise from animal sounds is featured. The question of the origin of human mentality through symbolism leads to Chapter VI. Life-Symbols: The Roots of Sacrament and VII. Life-Symbols: The Roots of Myth. The issue of the first mythical or human experiences receives more attention than it does in Cassirer's work. These two chapters lead to an equal treatment of music (VIII) followed by "The Genesis of Artistic Import" (IX). Clearly, the book, proclaim itself to be a new beginning in philosophy, treats its subjects as if they are only beginnings to be discussed more

Myth Is in "a New Key "

269

in future works. The issue of myth here as in future works is significant partially because it serves to introduce the genesis of art. Since myth is now regarded in a new group of activities, including art and music, they will need a full treatment to make up for Cassirer's comparative neglect. The tendency in this book as it will be throughout her life is to see myth as a beginning for art, to interpret it in terms that can apply also to art, and to find new, deeper origins for all these types of symbolism than Cassirer found. Nevertheless, the theory of myth, changed by related theories formulated in previous works, begins still other theories in new ways each time. The last chapter, "The Fabric of meaning," concludes the book by raising the previous discussion of symbolism to a more general level of the unity of symbolism in the totality of life and by making the introduction of the idea of prediscursive symbolism relevant to contemporary life. In this discussion the question of the presence of myth in modern life is an important issue as it was in Cassirer's philosophy. THE NEW KEY: THE MOVEMENT EMPHASIZING SYMBOLISM, AND LANGER'S EMPHASIS ON THE PREDISCURSIVE Modest yet with a sense of an important mission, she claims the new key of symbolism is not the result of her efforts alone, nor those of her and Cassirer combined: "This book purports merely to demonstrate the unrecognized fact that it is a new key, and to show how the main themes of our thought tend to be transposed in it" (PNK xiii). The new recognition of symbolism is a giant wave coming on the shore of intellectual life. It started with Charles Sanders Peirce in the nineteenth century and includes Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alfred North Whitehead, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Cassirer, and many others working in a variety of fields. Despite the general affiliation with this new key of thinking, she believes she has some definitely unique ideas, which show the new intellectual framework in which myth is to be interpreted. Now this is a mere declaration of faith, preliminary to a confession of heresy. The heresy is this: that I believe there is a primary need in man, which other creatures probably do not have, and which actuates all his apparently unzoological aims, his wistful fancies, his consciousness of value, his utterly impractical enthusiasms, and his awareness of a '"Beyond" filled with holiness. Despite the fact that this need gives rise to

270

Cassirer and Langer on Myth almost everything that we commonly assign to the "higher" life, it is not itself a "higher" form of some "lower" need; it is quite essential, imperious, and general, and may be called "high" only in the sense that it belongs exclusively (I think) to a very complex and perhaps recent genus. It may be satisfied in crude, primitive ways or in conscious and refined ways, so it has its own hierarchy of "higher" and "lower," elementary and derivative forms. The basic need, which certainly is obvious only in man, is the need of symbolization (40-41).

One original point of departure is the belief in an instinct of symbolism, in other words, a biological basis of symbolism. This principle allows her to relate myth and art, since both are the result of the instinct, and allows her to explain how myth can occur in primitive and modern civilizations. These relations of myth to art and technology in modern life will be discussed. If symbolism is the result of a human instinct, then it will be present from the beginning of humankind up to the present, from childhood to maturity, from the least developed people in any society to the most; then the idea becomes a very general, unifying, explanatory principle. The instinct manifests itself in different ways, all of which are modes of "symbolic transformation," the spontaneous changing of environmental stimuli and even the making of new stimuli into symbols. THE NATURE OF HUMAN SYMBOLS: THEIR DIFFERENCE FROM ANIMAL SIGNALS For Langer, as it was for Cassirer in An Essay on Man, published as a whole only two years after Philosophy in a New Key, human symbols differ in kind from what animals use. Cassirer used the word "sign" for what animals use and in the first edition of her book Langer also did, but she later changed it to "signal" so that "sign" could be used to include both signals and symbols. A "signal" is a cause of behavior, not an opportunity for thought. It is part of an actual situation in which the animal now belongs, and it does not allow the animal to change this situation or enlarge it or to change the total orientation to the situation and retain the change as a permanent attitude. In an example she gives, on the basis of Wolfgang Köhler's empirical research with apes, a monkey can only use a stick as a tool to get a banana down if the two objects are in the same field of vision or physically close. A human, however, can permanently regard the stick as a tool, carrying it around for future use, going

Myth Is in "a New Key "

271

on expeditions to find more bananas, or even changing its use to also serve as a weapon. To be a symbol, some physical object must be regarded as belonging to a domain larger than an actual physical environment; images or words or pictures or symbolic actions characterize the physical thing so that it is a part of a past, a present, and a future; it is part of a not-here and a not-now world which is different in character from any mere animal environment. As one difference, the human has open to it new possibilities of behavior which are so different that the appearance of the entire earth has changed while animals still live in the jungles, literally and metaphorically. Langer's distinction between signals and symbols does not depart much from that of Cassirer. In Philosophy in a New Key Langer's new key is evident in her use of Köhler's Mentality ofApes (1925) and his Gestalt Psychology (1929), the one study being a preparation for the next. It is important for her view of symbolism that animals cannot form cognitive wholes of meaning called gestalts, like the imaginary whole situation of a stick not physically present being a tool to get down a banana. Also, the variable status of a stick for humans, now being a tool, now a pole for a flag, later something else, shows the stick to be capable of various symbolic meanings, each an alternative one waiting in reserve in memory, which can be called gestalts, as they mean more than just a single object: they imply a whole situation in which the stick can be used. Whether or not someone accepts Langer's wholistic approach to epistemology, it is worth pointing out that the title of her most famous work assumes the attitude, because in music when there is a change of key, the melody remains the same although all the notes played in the previous key will be changed to new ones, usually by a system of changes, from flat to sharp, and from one level on the scale to another, higher or lower. In spite of the fact that Langer does not try to explain every single change which would constitute her shift to a new key in philosophy, she does hold herself accountable for the intelligibility of the new melody she attempts to play: a new theory of myth, evolving through her works. Conceptual revolutions, changes in all the concepts of a field, gestalt shifts, became discussed widely with the publication of Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Langer's idea of the new key predates Kuhn's idea by more than fifteen years while antedating some similar ideas in Cassirer's Logic of the Humanities, in which new significant works in the humanities are described as constituting new whole fields of meaning, such as new stylistic principles in a ground-breaking painting, or new criteria in a very original novel.

272

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

HOW LANGER'S NEW KEY DIFFERS FROM CASSIRER'S APPROACH Langer accepts, clarifies, and extends the basic conclusions of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Quite often, when a philosopher claims to have original ideas, there is also the claim that the precursor was wrong. No arguments against Cassirer's works are used. One main difference is that Langer usually speaks of "myth" in terms more of the product than the process, whereas Cassirer speaks of the symbolic form or mode of mythical consciousness. More often, Langer discusses actual products, artifacts, and in the case of myth, a type of verbal product like a story or narrative. This practice in the discussion is significant, because the word "myth" tends to be more limited in human evolution to primitive narratives of many kinds and because Langer does not make idealistic claims about what knowledge is or how a world can be thought of. Many scholars cannot accept Cassirer's ideas about these subjects or perhaps anyone's. The more concrete focus of attention is evident when Langer writes, "The human mind has an uncanny power of recognizing symbolic forms; and most readily, of course, will it seize upon those which are presented again and again without aberration" (PNK 191). Here "symbolic form" means the symbolic product, a vase, a word, a dance, the sight of a tree, or any perceptible thing, instead of the symbolizing process. The elimination of some metaphysical ideas, or the avoidance of discussing any that are in fact accepted, makes the book clearer than many passages in Cassirer's philosophy; Langer does accept the idea of a symbolic form manifest in all the products of a primitive or a musician or an artist. She admits that all musical phenomenon would have to have some "logical form" in them (PNK 224). "Yet," she qualifies her position, "I do not believe an idealistic interpretation of Reality is necessary to the recognition of art as a symbolic form" (PNK xiv). She prefers to think of her approach as logical, rather than metaphysical. She often uses more empirical, biological language than Cassirer does, as in her definition of "symbolic transformation": "a natural activity, a high form of nervous response." It may be that the attempt to avoid metaphysics directly only forces Langer to accept it—in the process of clarifying Cassirer's work she is not challenging it. Besides avoiding some idealistic assumptions and terminology directly, Langer also attempts to clarify the basic ideas from Cassirer by looking for biological foundations instead of metaphysical ones. The ti-

Myth Is in "a New Key "

273

ties of Chapters VI and VII, which use the term "Life-Symbols," show that she is looking for the basis of symbols in life processes, a goal Cassirer does not have. No matter what heights the human mind may attain, it can work only with the organs it has and the functions peculiar to them. Eyes that did not see forms could never furnish it with images; ears that did not hear articulated sounds could never open it to words. Sense-data, in brief, would be useless to a mind whose activity is "through and through a symbolic process," were they not par excellence receptacles of meaning. But meaning, as previous considerations have shown, accrues essentially to forms. . . . A mind that works primarily with meaning must have organs that supply it primarily with forms" (PNK 90).

These meaningful forms are the gestalts of gestalt psychology. Some gestalts when not directly perceptual may seem to be "mythical," pseudoentities. Just as Freud's psychology has often been criticized for introducing "mythological" or nonphysical explanatory concepts, such as the Id, Ego, and Superego, or the Oedipal complex, so too Cassirer's symbolic form seems to some critics to be a nonmaterial deus ex machina (e.g. Clifford Geertz). Since Langer feels the weight of such a kind of objection against Cassirer's views, she would like to base the idea of a symbolic form in physical reality. This goal guides Langer's entire career, culminating in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. In the definition of symbolic transformation, a biological reason is given for the unprecedented human capacity: "all art is but a projection of them [the creature's own internal rhythms] from one domain of sense to another, a symbolic transformation" (PNK 227). Here, the "transformation" in any symbol means the biological function of the human nervous system and brain to immediately translate data from one sense into some corresponding data in another sense so as to form a total, variable meaning. To illustrate Langer's meaning, I would like to give an example of a common transference of meaning from one sense to another. Red is said to be a "hot" color and in this metaphor, more specifically a metonymy, a transfer of the trait of one thing to another thing, the visual datum red is transferred to the sense of touch where it is registered as the tactile datum of "heat," without any such object ever having been touched in one's life. True enough, the role of memory and the conceptual process of analogy complicate this issue. Notwithstanding those valuable considerations,

274

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

many examples are available to show how tactile data in primitives also have a spontaneous visual cross reference; the directions of the cosmos, north, south, east, and west, often are based on the parts of a human body, or the body of a mythical creature, the body of which resembles the human in basic features. Though Cassirer gives many such examples in Mythical Thought, Volume II of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, he

does not do so with the same goals in mind. The principle of the transference or perhaps translation of meaning from one of the five senses into any or all of the others is very important in Langer's idea of the symbol, a kind of gestalt, a whole unit of meaning, an imaginary building block of a conceptual world. The idea of transference suggests the idealistic assumption that there is no simply given sensory datum without some process of the imagination going into its constitution; at the least human meaning is never limited to one sense; the imagination is always present because the datum is representable as possible through other senses, whether or not the person is thinking about the representation explicitly. This idealistic theory of knowledge has the advantage of correlating cultural differences on a very large scale (different political systems) with differences on the small scale of perceptual objects. If there is no difference in perception, then large-scale cultural differences are not essential ones in the theory of knowledge. Then Langer attempts to clarify human symbolism by showing new physical causes for what Cassirer thought to be only metaphysical ones ("metaphysics" in ancient Greek meaning the study "after the physics" of Aristotle, or also "beyond" the physics). With less emphasis on metaphysics, more on analysis and logic, Langer intends to explain subjects hardly covered at all by Cassirer, namely art (as an objectification of feeling) and later the evolution of mind (as a state of a physical organism).

LANGER'S GENERATIVE IDEAS AND THE GENERATIVE IDEA OF LANGER The principles of a symbolic instinct and symbolic transformation lead Langer to conclude that some ideas transform experience more than others. They are called "generative ideas"; they change old ideas and generate new ones to take their place, and additional new ones to clarify the meaning of these generative ideas. There is a wholistic change entailed by a generative idea, and since the new key is also a wholistic change, a generative idea can be said to be an instance of the generative idea of all others: the new key in philosophy. Concretely, this statement means that

Myth Is in "a New Key "

275

any change in generative ideas, as from the middle ages to Descartes' new rationalism, is a change to a new key, a change in the value of all the old symbols, with the addition of some new ones. Besides applying to her own philosophy, Langer believes conceptual revolutions or gestalt shifts in meaning apply to the philosophical tradition. In her early work The Practice of Philosophy Langer reflects on the fact that all previous philosophical systems end in difficulties insoluble according to the current assumptions (173), the only solution being a new start. At the beginnings of the great philosophies the ideas can be said to by mythical or metaphorical. Instead of treating them negatively because they are not as clear as they will become, Langer treats them positively because they initiate many other ideas in their wake. They represent the start of a cultural era, not its end. She gives the example of the myth-making of Plato: From Plato's teleological view of Nature, whereupon all things "strive for perfection," Aristotle gathers the vitally important scientific ideas of norm and function. And therewith the old Eleatic paradox of Being and Process, without receiving an answer, simply becomes innocuous, meaningless—the standpoint of the ancients is transcended by the new concepts of form and function. Plato did not actually transcend it; he was impatient of it. . . his original, free, superior intellect was of the myth-making sort, which understands and suggests, but never quite fixes or expounds a discovery. It requires more wisdom to appreciate Plato than to follow Aristotle; with the former, the new logical light was born, with the latter it was given to the sciences. The literal formulation of Plato's thought is Aristotle's greatest merit, far greater than the codification of propositions that passes as his logical contribution (The Practice of Philosophy 180-181).

New original insights are always "in a mythical stage" (210). By this, of course, she does not mean that the concepts are of the same type or level as those in primitive societies. She means "every myth must be redeemed by a scientific inspiration" (Ibid. 211). A mythical concept at different levels of mental evolution would have some analogous characteristics of its own combined with an analogous relation to subsequent scientific concepts in relation to it. This evolutionary and relational definition of myth has a general fairly common assumption. History repeats itself, forming analogous cycles. In the phylogeny of the human race, the development of humanity

276

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

as a group, myth develops into science, and so, since ontogeny repeats phylogeny, since the individual repeats in a summary fashion the development of the race, all individual periods of intellectual growth will resemble those of the single course of civilization, and all individual people repeat the learning process of their ancestors in varying degrees of completion and in a much briefer period. In defence of Langer, such an assumption seems necessary if there is ever to be a process of accumulation of knowledge from the previous generation and if this accumulation occurs again and again in almost each new generation for thousands of years. Her thinking proceeds in this way, assuming Cassirer's conclusions about the course of all civilization being the development of myth into other forms and finally into science. Each period within this single development would also be analogous to the whole. An empiricist or analytic philosopher would want some of these assumptions proven or disallowed. Cassirer and Langer allow some idealistic assumptions when they help to form a total coherent theory. The value of a new idea is not so much its truth as it is its capacity to lead to other ideas, not so much its actual assertions as its "primitive ideas" (Ibid. 170). The idea can be found in Cassirer's philosophy as a passing comment: Wilhelm von Humboldt's ideas about language were not clear at first but they were productive (PSF I, 156). In "The End of an Epoch," published ten years before Philosophy in a New Key, Langer describes epochs of civilization as occurring in cycles beginning with the sterile paradoxes of an old epoch changing into the generative mythical ideas of a new one. These in turn would eventually develop into sterile paradoxes. The generative ideas of any age are like mythical ideas. Primitive images embody general ideas (PNK 145); however, since they are still confused with particular things, people wrongly take them literally (178). Pythagoras, for example, did this when the number ten was thought to have the shape of a pyramid, or to have a religious significance. The symbol, the numerical relation, is understood through the sense image, a pyramid. Without the image, there can be no idea of ten; as in the beginning of counting primitives cannot count unless they can touch parts of their bodies or the objects counted. Like mythical ideas, generative ideas embody general ideas, a new vision of the world, which must be clarified by many other more analytical, detailed, abstract ideas. They do not, however, all have the same level of intellectual ability throughout human history. Langer is using "mythical" in a special limited sense for generative ideas. On this view, there would be mythical

Myth Is in "a New Key "

277

ideas at stages throughout the history of science, especially when new conceptions expressed in images requiring vast changes in perspective are dawning. Langer uses the idea of a generative idea to explain changes in symbolic transformation throughout civilization and to be consistent she must characterize her own work according to it. The new key of her work is a generative idea: symbolic transformation (PNK 25). She believes with it she can avoid many problems in epistemology because they become meaningless. She can also be the source of a series of studies to follow by other scholars. "The chief virtue of a fertile theory," she writes, "is that it allows philosophical inquiry (i.e. conceptual anaylsis and construction) to go into detail" (Introduction to Reflections on Art xiii). A generative idea has implied within it a new worldview. New questions would arise. New terms would come into use. Different goals and methods would be available. There can be generative ideas in different fields. Usually, on her view, art starts an epoch ("The End of an Epoch" 773). This is one reason for her interest in art. Philosophy, in contrast, being reflective, is usually at the close of an epoch. These views are important for the theory of myth because they imply its continuous evolution or discontinuous reappearance throughout civilization. More often than in the case of myth in Langer's writings, art has the function of beginning a new period of culture. Both myth and art are beginnings because they are classified in a type of symbolism which leads to the second main type: presentational symbols develop into discursive ones. Sometimes, the relation of art to myth is described as the relation of a formal activity to its raw material, an idea explained in her later works. PRESENTATIONAL AND DISCURSIVE SYMBOLS: MYTHICAL SYMBOLS ARE PRESENTATIONAL In the same manner that metaphorical ideas become literal, presentational symbolism leads to discursive. The distinction between these two types helps Langer show the power of her new idea of symbolic transformation. With it, she can develop a theory of the presentational symbolisms, like art, myth, religion, music, among others, usually neglected in previous epistemology. Hardly does she discuss science. The purpose of Philosophy in a New Key is to correct the previous prejudice that only science is true knowledge and the imbalanced concern with discursive symbolisms.

278

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

What is more, presentational symbolism in the fullest sense is below the threshold of language. "But the limits of language," she insists, "are not the last limits of experience, and things inaccessible to language may have their own forms of conception, that is to say, their own symbolic devices. Such nondiscursive forms, charged with logical possibilities of meaning, underlie the significance of music . .. (PNK 265). There are many differences between the two kinds according to Langer. First of all, in presentational symbols such as a painting, the meaning is intuited as a whole rather than being built up successively as it is in a discursive theory of science, with different laws depending on other ones (FF 379 and PNK 93-94). The meaning of a scientific theory, a theorem in geometry, is more successively built up than sentences in ordinary language, which are still more successive than the meaning of a painting. Concerning this wholistic meaning of presentational symbols, Langer writes, "It is impossible to find the smallest independent symbol, and recognize its identity when the same unit is met in other contexts. Photography, therefore, has no vocabulary" (PNK 95). A different example of this feature of presentation symbol is the psychoanalytic idea of condensation found in dream symbolism or in myths. As an example, Langer mentions the mythical symbol of the moon, which contains many ideas at once, so to speak, and there is no sequence, no hierarchy in these ideas, nor are they presented through an image sequentially (PNK 191). Secondly, in presentational symbols, each part does not have a meaning assigned to it independently of its position in the whole. There are no synonyms, and a part cannot be substituted. In contrast, scientific symbols can be substituted, for they must have the same definition in all the propositions that they appear in and some other symbol can be chosen for this definition. I would like to add that natural languages are somewhat in the middle because, though a dictionary can be constructed, words have different meanings and these depend upon the context of usage. Thirdly, presentational symbols do not mean something outside themselves; they are not referential. Discursive symbols are. For this reason no one asks if a piece of music is true or not. Proof and truth are considerations only for discursive symbols depending upon an external reference for their meaning. Fourthly, the full meaning of a presentational symbol is not translatable; it is bound to the particular form (PNK 260). Languages are translatable in some degree, but idioms, literary language, and the network of associations make a perfect translation impossible. In contrast, science is often called the universal language. Fifthly, discursive symbols are always general and require application to be

Myth Is in "a New Key "

279

tested or to be fully intelligible (PNK 286). Presentational symbols give a unique, complete, meaningful thing or performance. Sixthly, presentational symbols are always specific and unique (PNK 96). The painting of Mona Lisa is a singular meaningful artwork; the name "Mona Lisa" might actually have been applicable to other living women. The scientific idea of the chemical composition of the paints used would also apply to other things painted, not only this painting or paintings of other women. Presentational symbols have an evolution as do the discursive. In Language and Myth Cassirer discussed the differences in the ways language and myth have evolved. Langer repeats the main idea when she writes, "It [presentational symbolism] grows from the momentary, single, static image presenting a simple concept to greater and greater units of successive images having reference to each other; changing scenes, even visions of things in motion, by which we conceive the passage of events" (PNK 145). In Mythical Thought Cassirer mentions the cosmologies in the Ancient Near East and Greece as always restricted to the use of images from the real world on which to base the most general ideas: wind and fire were such metaphors for the process of the universe in the pre-Socratic philosophers. After defining its theoretical framework, including the distinction between presentational and discursive symbols and a discussion of language, Philosophy in a New Key is primarily concernced with presentational symbolisms: "VI. Life-Symbols: The Roots of Sacrament"; "VII. Life-Symbols: The Roots of Myth"; "VIII. On Significance in Music"; "IX. The Genesis of Artistic Import"; and "X. The Fabric of Meaning" in which these main symbolisms are related. THE MUTUAL INFLUENCE OF LANGUAGE AND MYTH As has just been mentioned, language is a type of symbolism midway between the presentational and the discursive. Referring to Cassirer, Langer states that it is "a record of mythic conception and the source of generalization and scientific conception" (FF 378). With respect to myth, language would serve two primary purposes: it would help the mythical consciousness to think more generally than feelings bound to images of particular emotions, objects, places, and times. On the other hand, it would retain some of the legacy of myth in the form of the irreducible emotional undercurrent of language. Words have their negative and positive tones; words have social register, meaning contexts of

280

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

appropriacy; words have differences in rhythm and sensuous quality. These particularities of meaning are limited in importance in modern language albeit first present in mythical images, magic, ritual, and religion. It follows from what Langer writes and what is written by Cassirer that language helps the mythical consciousness to overcome the otherwise insurmountable dependence on images from perception. In ancient Greek philosophy cosmology gradually rid itself of references to physical things as the first principle of the universe. It was gradually understood that no single physical thing was adequate to express the complexity of the unity of the universe, which afterall was not a single thing but a set of laws of order. As symbols, words are in a sense more symbolic; their denotations are more inclusive, their expressions are more variable, and they can be combined more than images, which retain some specific sensory properties. For these reasons, words are better vehicles of analysis and abstraction, though not the best. In the progressive development of the mythical consciousness language helps it to think in a more accurate, comprehensive way, and build up a more unified, lawful world. It is well known that language in very young children is a prerequisite for memory and definite concepts of the self. Children must come to learn what the boundaries of physical objects are. In Langer's words, language helps the mind "hold on to an object" (and later science would be able to analyze it even better): This tendency is comprehensible enough if we consider the preeminence which a named element holds in the kaleidoscopic flow of sheer sense and feeling. For as soon as an object is denoted, it can be held [in the mind], so that anything else that is experienced at the same time, instead of crowding it out, exists with it, in contrast or in unison or in some other definite way. If the ape who wants a banana beyond his cage could only keep "banana, banana," in his head while he looks behind him at the convenient bamboo, he could use the rod to fetch his lunch. But without language, relations are either taken for granted in action—as by a dog, for instance, who looks hopefully inside the garbage pail, or takes shelter from punishment under the sofa—or they cannot be experienced at all. The ape simply knew nothing about the relation of stick and fruit when their co-presence was not visible. This phenomenon of holding on to the object by means of its symbol is so elementary that language has grown up on it. A word fixes something in experience, and makes it the nucleus of memory, an available conception. Other impressions group themselves round the

Myth Is in "a New Key "

281

denoted thing and are associatively recalled when it is named. A whole occasion may be retained in thought by the name of an object or a person that was its center (PNK 135).

The ideas are so similar to Cassirer's that it seems he could have written it. Myth is important for language, too. Communal ritual experiences were probably necessary for the origin of language. Langer believes that working in groups, primitives probably started to make the sounds of the rhythms of moving tools or other sounds related to their common work. Lewis Mumford, among others, agrees with the ritual origin of language (The Myth of the Machine 85). LANGER SEEKS THE ROOTS OF SACRAMENT For Cassirer, the mythical symbol was the basis of the mythical consciousness; for Langer, the mythical symbol has a basis in life processes. The processes become "life-symbols," which "present the basic facts of human existence" (PNK 153). Even though the scope of myth differs considerably for Cassirer and Langer, the difference seems to be primarily a choice of definitions and not a disagreement in ideas. Cassirer's mythical consciousness includes all the states of mind in Chapter VI: Life-Symbols: The Roots of Sacrament. There Langer describes the first dawning of human consciousness before language and ritual. Then the flux of sensation stabilized around centers of attention until an image could be formed based on any of the human senses. The "image" need not be visual; it could even be tactile. The stimuli of sensation form an image insofar as they come to have a nonphysical meaning or suggest something that is not present. Things which are needed in life, e.g. water, are worshipped as divine agents of life, perhaps a water god. In vegetation cults, sun worship, magic, totemism, and so on various divine presences begin to form in the worship of Life and the aversion toward Death. The tropism of the images seems to constitute a primitive value system with Life at the good end and death at the other end. To this extent Langer's account attempts to be an etiology and archaeology of human values. Indeed, the description of this state of the first human mind involves some reconstructive speculation, aided by linguistic studies of primitive languages in which differing degrees of the capacity to order the environment suggest what the levels might have been like even a little before

282

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

them. The reconstruction is partially done with the help of studies reporting the interaction of ethnologists with primitives found to be living on quite primitive levels. Also helpful in reconstruction, the experience of early childhood seems to provide a model for the first human behavior. Cassirer does describe what he thinks is the first stage of human symbolism in Mythical Thought, but Langer saves the term myth for a slightly higher level when images are united in explanatory narratives. On a lower level are sacraments developed from ordinary life processes. Due to the repetition of daily actions as well as their importance an occasion may begin to acquire more intense values until definite images or traits can be isolated. Eventually, the primitives may be eating not just food but "animal characteristics" (PNK 161). Attention to the procedures requires that the food preparation, the cutting, the serving, be done in the same way every time. Even before language is available, the actions can acquire a magical efficacy to make the animal virtues present once again. And, in a way, the primitives are right: the animal traits are present when the primitives mimic them in rituals arising from the communal fiests. Langer defines sacrament to include the combination of "power and meaning, mediation and presentation" (161). Sacraments involving food have continued throughout the evolution of religion. Other sacraments would involve important daily repeatable processes of the passage into adulthood, marriage, giving birth, disposing of the dead, and other significant markers of the stages in life. The roots of sacrament would also be found in the importance invested in slaughter, sexual union, isolated fetishes, idols, sacred animals, even places. By the term "life-symbols" Langer tries to define a level of human meaning below or before language, a level embodied in action which shows how the mythical symbol defined by Cassirer could have come into being. Langer's chapter is important for collecting isolated ideas of Cassirer on this issue of the first human experience and making them into a clearer picture of a gradual process. She would like to reconstruct the inner experience more faithfully. Sacrament helps to form religion on its lower levels; on its higher levels the "myth-making instinct" helps to form religion at the same time that philosophical thought begins to carry the human spirit further than religion can (170). As for Cassirer, philosophical thought is sometimes described as a replacement for religion, at other times as a complimentary evolving activity. Langer does not attempt to systematize these relations as much as Cassirer does; perhaps she accepts his contribution on these matters.

Myth Is in "a New Key "

283

THE DEVELOPMENT OF RITUAL FROM MOTOR ATTITUDES One difference is crucial, and this one is unique to Langer's philosophy. Sacrament and ritual have roots different from those of myth, which originates philosophy, and so religion and philosophy are not as comparable as two stages in the history of science. They belong to some extent in different activities of experience according to Langer. Ritual begins in motor attitudes, which, however, personal, are at once externalized and so made public. Myth begins in fantasy, which may remain tacit for a long time; for the primary form of fantasy is the entirely subjective and private phenomenon of dream. The lowest form of story is not much more than a dream-narrative. It has no regard whatever for coherence or even consistency of action . . . primitive story has some other than literal significance. It is made essentially of dream-material; the images in it are taken from life, they are things and creatures, but their behavior follows some entirely unempirical law; by realistic standards it is simply inappropriate to them (171).

Still, at this stage, the earliest stories are not yet religious myths, nor any other kind of myth because they are only a means of self-expression and are only records of subjective experience, dreams presented in waking life to the dreamer. With an increase in the number and the definiteness of sacramental life-symbols, the behaviors become so formalized as to constitute "ritual" (153). For Langer, ritual is an advancement upon the mere formation of life-symbols, which do not yet contain an awareness of the human response to the life-actions; ritual does contain the sense of what the humans should do, and the rituals involve acting out the divine forces encountered and the human response. The feeling in rituals can be generalized to a feeling relatable to other experiences at other times (153). The rites inculcate relatively permanent emotional attitudes toward objects and situations—the prototypes of some values. Images and feelings are presented to primitives about their own wills, thought processes, power, and death without yet having the clearness of ideas with explanations. Through rituals primitives act out their life processes in an intermediate step toward their fuller understanding. Religion, according to Langer, develops from ritual and is "a gradual envisagement of the essential pattern of human life" (155). Langer's view is successful at making the origin of

284

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

religion a little more meaningful than Cassirer does. Her insistence on the connection between religion and the life processes of physical human beings helps to explain its deep and continuing power. Besides the development of systematic philosophy another activity sometimes thought to replace religion is the development of science. Langer does not think so. Instead, she thinks religion in some forms, in the form of superstition and fantastic Biblical world-history, was "outgrown by the European mind. Again the individual life shows in microcosm the pattern of human evolution" (PNK 270). This idea seems to suggest that religion in some new form can show the pattern of the life in a later stage of civilization. Gradually, ritual becomes systematized both by its own development and by the contribution of other activities. Langer believes music helps to present life rhythms of many kinds, making the various types of activities clearer, allowing them to become invested with new magical, symbolic significance (246). THE EXPLANATION OF MAGIC AS THE PRESENTATION OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS Langer's view of the relationship of ritual, magic, and religion is clearer than Cassirer's is. Some scholars, such as Donald Verene, have raised the criticism that Cassirer does not explain well enough how primitives can be so proficient in their daily activities if they only use myths ("Cassirer's View of Myth and Symbol"). Langer has a solution when she explains the rituals of magic, which grow out of a religious attitude, not vice versa (158-59). At first rain-making rituals only celebrated the rain, made it symbolic for primitives to feel definitely, created the opportunity for them to define their nature in relation to rain. The rituals helped to give them a sense of a world including both rain and themselves. The rite becomes more fully developed when it is completed in a magical act. Despite the modern mind's tendency to regard the magic as performed for a specific empirical result—to produce rain, Langer believes the primitive mind added magic to the rituals of rain-dancing in order to include their presence in the cosmic event. The primitives are completing the world-picture by seeing themselves in relation to the divine force of the rain. The attempt to produce rain is a step forward in the development of mind because it occurs hand-in-hand with an increase in self-sonsciousness; the limits of the human will and its relation to external forces is slowly evolving. Langer avoids the problem of the practical-

Myth Is in "a New Key "

285

ity of magic: why do primitives continue to perform the rites when they do not work? It seems to be Langer's view that the primitive mind cannot conceive of the practice as a matter of success or failure. Most of the times it does not rain after a rain-making ritual, at least not until the primitives have evolved enough so that the rituals are performed only when the gods seem ready and friendly—when there are rain clouds looming. The rituals are always a success in the sense of creating a relationship between the primitive and the divine rain god. Sometimes, the god does not answer with rain, but that is his or her choice, not a matter of inconsistency or failure. The problem for the primitives is to make images of rain and this involves relating them to other images. It follows from her view that they are more concerned with the religious-magical images than with the practical rain; after all, one cannot try to produce something until one knows what one is trying to produce and what one is capable of producing. In a way the primitives are right to try magic; they unwittingly know how to put first things first. Here Langer's idea of the symbolic instinct may offer some support for her derivation of magic from religion, not from practical needs. The idea of a babbling instinct in early childhood has been reported in many studies of childhood psychology; at a certain age, approximately two, many children become hungry for names and want to know the names of everything around them. Finding the names allows them to increase their memory, ask for things, talk about them, and so create a mental world in which they are all related. Similarly, the symbolic instinct in magic rituals helps the primitives come to understand the personal will in relation to external natural forces. Whatever purpose magical practice may serve, its direct motivation is the desire to symbolize great conceptions. It is the overt action in which a rich and savage imagination automatically ends. Its origin is probably not practical at all, but ritualistic; its central aim is to symbolize a Presence, to aid in the formulation of a religious universe It is not ignorance of causal relations, but the supervention of an interest stronger than his practical interest, that holds him to magical rites. This stronger interest concerns the expressive value of such mystic acts (PNK 49).

The fact that the symbolization ends in "overt action" shows the two inherent tendencies of symbols to become related to other ones and to be represented in a perceptible form. These tendencies show how the

286

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

primitive seemingly nonsensical fantasy differs from delusions and hallucinations which are not integrative in relation to other symbols and do not seek to organize and be organized through a common public reality. THE START OF MYTH AND THE RISE OF THEOLOGY FROM IT Religious feelings based primarily in motor attitudes can only produce magical divinities, not theologies. They rise from myth, in Langers's view: "A symbol may give identity to a god, a mimetic dance may express his favors, but what really fixes his character is the tradition of his origin, actions, and past adventures. Like the hero of a novel or a drama, he becomes a personality, not by his sheer appearance, but by his story" (PNK 169). The motives for continuing to develop the myths of the gods must be explained. Langer does not think the longer, more complex myths serving more and more as a pattern for all the activities of life would have been made merely for specific practical purposes. The primitives need a field of thought no less than modern people do. It is the field of thought, the sense of a world, that allows human practical actions to occur, just as space is a matrix for spatial things—it belongs in a different category. In both myth and practical activities (a distinction not intelligible to the primitive) operates the "symbolific operation of the mind," the involuntary spontaneous need to produce symbols (PNK 51). Unwittingly, naturally, primitives created the gods in order to create themselves and recreate themselves. Langer's view that the primary motive for science is to create a field

for thought, thus making it an avenue of self-development is original, provocative (PNK 271). She mentions other motives such as practical gain including survival and the more vain dominion over nature, which she allows as lesser goals in stages of civilization beyond the primitive. To strengthen her claims, she adduces the problems encountered in attempts to explain the practical significance of many forms of mythical behavior. If they are not attempts to get practical results in nature, then science may also have other goals than this, even though common sense does not consider them. Viewing science as primarily yet not exclusively a mode of self-development allows Langer to explain how it can be placed along with art and myth and religion and music in some very general categories common to all, and necessary to human culture. Her theory of knowledge seeks categories to overcome the distinction between

Myth Is in "a New Key "

287

nature and culture, knowledge and mere imagination, truth and mythical illusion. Then, it becomes easier to see how science can be equal to art in importance for humanity, and how myth is not just an illusion. A main problem in theories of myth is its truth value: the explanation of its meaning and the relevance of this meaning for reality. Even though myth arises through fantasy, in which the story is entirely bound to the desires of the teller, it is not therefore limited to it; it is not merely subjective. Like Cassirer, Langer believes myths are prior to the distinction between knowledge of nature and knowledge of culture. Their comprehensive applicability prevents them from being only personal delusions. Like Cassirer, they are created by a community, as a language is, not by isolated individuals. In them there is knowledge of nature in relation to the self. Langer points out the role of nature symbols in myths to stabilize the characters in the myths, helping to ensure an overall consistency of the human with the natural (180). In a pre-mythical narrative the culture hero combats cosmic forces for the sake of human values; however, the hero is not yet very generalizable to the experience of all members of society and still metamorphosizes into other creatures or they do so, and other violations of nature occur (179). As human thinking advances in Langer's theory, from dream to fantasy to fairy-tale to nature myth to culture-hero story to legend to myth, the characters acquire increasing stability and permanence while the meaning becomes more general, more applicable to the phenomena of life (193). Through the process of myth, the distinction between nature and culture becomes somewhat clearer, yet never as satisfactory as the modern mind makes it. AGAINST THE VIEW OF PERSONIFICATION: THE FUNCTIONS OF HYPOSTASIS AND GENERALIZATION Langer argues against the view that myths contain personifications of natural phenomena. She believes this assumes a clear idea of a non-natural subject and a non-subjective object in the world, which is a postmythical idea. The constructions in myths almost seem to develop in the reverse. When describing a Maui myth, Langer interprets it by saying, "Hina is not a symbol of the moon, but the moon is a symbol of Hina, Woman" (190). She explains her point later: "as a myth-making mentality does not keep symbol and meaning apart, the moon not only represents, but presents, Woman, the mother of Maui. Not personification of the moon, but a lunarization of Hina, gives rise to Polynesian cosmology" (193).

288

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The character of Hina in the myth and the visual imagery create certain qualities of women in a process called hypostasis. The myths help the primitives to become aware of what a woman is, in all her features— the essence, eventually. At the same time the myths become more and more general so that ordinary knowledge of what women are and do becomes united with knowledge about the rest of the universe, even the moon, which is after all not an (ordinary) object in the same sense that a woman is. The two processes of construction in myths are complimentary. A fabric of meaning is woven, ever larger and more intricate, yet the relationship of woman and moon never becomes referential: the one is never a symbol for the other as a referent; the relation is never an analogy with some traits being applicable to the other object. The moon presents womankind as a spirit, a divine presence. The myths help primitives discover their inner self and an outer world. Langer's explanation has the value of giving credit to the primitives for being interested in what is closer to home, namely women. Equally, though, women perhaps acquire more value as figures in myths than they have in daily life. However, her point is not exactly this; I think the import is more general than the specific meaning of woman or Hina or the moon. What could be more important and human than having a cosmos rather than having a chaos? Many myths such as the Babylonian Myth of Creation have this theme. The primitives make myths in order to more clearly occupy a role in a cosmos, and Langer's explanation has the value of showing the intrinsically evolutionary momentum in myths toward moral values and lawfulness in nature, due to the increasing tendencies toward integration of all images into an ever more comprehensive narrative. Myths have tended to become related to one another to form one myth, one cosmology (PNK 176). The inherent tendency would promote the coherence within the myth, which is quite minimal in the first dreamlike stories, as well as some correspondence, for images of nature would be intermixed with those of the inner feelings of an emerging self. According to Langer the highest form is in epic poetry in which the stage becomes the actual earth, Mount Olympus, and human freedom begins to replace mythical destiny in the struggles of Zeus against the Fates. From the gods a person is to be born in their likeness. To extend her line of thinking I would like to point out that in the sixth-century cosmology of Pherecydes of Syros the old mythical figure of Kronos changes its name and character and becomes Chronos or time, making him more of a natural phenomenon than a personal figure. In the same way mythical destiny controlled by gods gives way to ideas of

Myth Is in "a New Key "

289

moral lawfulness and personal ethical freedom, ideas first developed in Greek philosophy. It was Socrates who claimed to have turned away from the reflections of Anaxagors on a universal mind (Nous) in all things to ethical reflections on how people should lead their lives. MYTH IN "THE FABRIC OF MEANING" The final chapter of Philosophy in a New Key shows the mutual relevance of all the distinct cultural activities discussed prior to it. It explains their common goal: a unified outlook on life depending more or less on their complementary contributions. Symbols cannot but help to lead to others of the same type and somewhat to others of different types so as to unify experience. Even in modern life, the contribution of myth, however changed from its primitive type, is necessary. Without it, there can be problems caused in personal and social life, one of them being a sense of the lack of an overall meaning in life. With it, there can also be problems when primitive forms of it are used in place of more modern ones or when they replace modern rational approached to problems. These problems will be discussed more specifically in Chapter 14 of this book along with many other ideas of Langer on this subject to be found in later publications. THE RELATIONSHIP OF PHILOSOPHY IN A NEW KEY TO LATER WORKS This work establishes a general theory of symbolism and presents many ideas especially on presentational modes. The work, however, is too general to be a philosophy of culture with a complete theory of myth, because the meanings of these types of symbolism consists in the manner of their production and so such differences in the arts must be explained in detail in future works. In them she will be able to show in more depth how human feeling has an inhering form, a preconscious or deep structure [a term here loosely borrowed from Noam Chomsky's linguistics] that becomes conscious and fully formed through art, above all other activities, including myth. In fact the feeling of myth is shown to have a structure, a definite form, in artworks.

This page intentionally left blank

CHAPTER 12

Myth Is a "Form of Feeling" A Definition through a Symbolic Theory of Art ". . . feelings have definite forms, which become progressively articulated. Their development is effected through their 'interplay with the other aspects of experience '; but the nature of that interplay is not specified. Yet is it here, I think, that cogency for the whole thesis must be sought. What character of feeling is 'an index of the mind's grasp of its object,' and by what tokens is it so? If feeling has articulate forms, what are they like?" (PNK 100).

In Philosophy in a New Key Langer argues against philosophers who believe human experiences can only be meaningful if they are described in language; anything outside of language would then have no meaning (86). She would like to develop her idea that feelings have in them an implicit structure in Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key. She felt that the work written ten years before was a general theory of symbolism with an emphasis on the presentational as opposed to the discursive. Still, since the ideas there were "young and half poetic," they would need to be developed in more detail with logical clarity (PNK x). Langer has her reasons for following up the earlier work with a theory of art. That whole work tries to change the theory of knowledge by removing its prejudice on science, its discursive symbolism, so as to permit a new theory of knowledge in which other human activities are legitimate sources of human meaning. When writing about Cassirer's "great work" as a whole, she interprets "the creative imagination" to be "the chief antagonist" to science, which seems to win in his philosophy insofar as it comes as the crowning achievement in the last phase of civilization (FF 236). She aims to make "the theory of art as serious as the philosophy of science" (FF vii). The sequence of chapters partially shows the tendency of the ideas in them toward music and art, the modes of presentational symbolism that are more evolved than ritual and myth. 297

292

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The philosophical framework having been constructed in Philosophy in a New Key, the new theory of art can concentrate on the differences in the arts while investigating the meaning of presentational symbolisms more deeply, understanding them as forms with their basis in feeling. One problem to be faced, she admits, is the resistance of the subject matter of feeling to the logical concepts of philosophy (FF ix). Should the content of feeling be indefinite, inaccessible, or too dynamic for logical analysis, nevertheless it imprints its structure or leaves its signature, so to speak, in artistic works (FF 240). If her project proves successful, some new vocabulary would have to be invented. There are two other important reasons for her developing a theory of art. She believes, though art is old, the philosophy of art has never received the attention it is due. Some recent developments in theories of symbolism make the climate of opinion more ready for new aesthetics ("Introduction," Reflections on Art xvii). The theory of art can help to develop new ideas in the philosophy of culture. Legitimate as this reason is, and also the reason that her childhood involvement with the cello, piano, and poetry would make her interested in art, the main reason for this direction of inquiry may be her idea that art is the supreme cultural activity. Certainly there are many passages in which she writes in a neutral tone about correcting the tradition of epistemology's prejudice for science, and certainly she writes in favor of research in the plurality of modes of presentational symbolism. But at other times, a passion for art shows her personal and professional predilection: Every culture develops some kind of art as surely as it develops language. Some primitive cultures have no real mythology or religion, but all have some art—dance, song, design (sometimes only on tools or on the human body). Dance, above all, seems to be the oldest elaborated art. The ancient ubiquitous character of art contrasts sharply with the prevalent idea that art is a luxury product of civilization, a cultural frill, a piece of social veneer. It fits better with the conviction held by most artists, that art is the epitome of human life, the truest record of insight and feeling, and that the strongest military or economic society without art is poor in comparison with the most primitive tribe of savage painters, dancers, or idol carvers. Wherever a society has really achieved culture (in the ethnological sense, not the popular sense of "social form") it has begotten art, not late in its career, but at the very inception of it.

Myth Is a "Form of Feeling "

293

Art is, indeed, the spearhead of human development, social and individual. . .. What sort of thing is art, that it should play such a leading role in human development? It is not an intellectual pursuit, but is necessary to intellectual life; it is not religion, but grows up with religion, serves it, and in large measure determines it (PS 83-84).

If one read only this passage, it would seem that the prejudice for science had been replaced by a new prejudice for art. This passage is very characteristic of Langer's enthusiasm for the subject of art, subdued as it often is in more neutral terms. A little farther in that same passage she states a definition of art: "the practice of creating perceptible forms expressive of human feeling. I say 'perceptible' rather than 'sensuous' forms because some works of art are given to imagination rather than to the outward senses."

MYTH IN THE PLAN OF FEELING AND FORM How does this theory of art affect the theory of myth in Philosohy in a New Key? What ideas on myth does the new work contain? Ten percent of Feeling and Form is on myth (forty pages out of 411). The primary discussion is on primitive dancing in Chapter 12: "The Magic Circle," and there are discussions of myth, usually of three pages or so, in a few places in other chapters. This consideration of proportion and the distribution of the pages would suggest that myth is discussed for Langer to understand art better, as proto-art, that myth is not developed as a subject very much in its own right. In her books before and after this one, myth occupies a much more dominant role. This work, however, does offer new ideas about the way myth leads to art and, what is more, about the origin of myth. The conclusions about art apply with some adaptation to myth. A main principle in her theory of art is the significance of the symbolic process of expressive forms (FF 385). She compares the symbolisms of the arts more than other philosophers of art do (such as Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood, whom she names). By so doing she can show how the symbols have a coherence, how they are made through a similar process, how it begins and how the art develops. She is interested in the process of artistic creation, the discussion of which sheds light on the process of the mythical creation of a world. If an artwork is "any work symbolic of feeling," then myth is a process of giving forms to feelings (FF 40). On her view the artwork is a

294

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

single symbol whereby some feature of feeling can be "abstracted" from the flow of experience and thus presented before the artist and the public (FF xi and 350). In this way art is a vehicle of learning about implicit mental processes by presenting them, making them explicit. In this act there is a sense of a new experience, an element of surprise: "Every product of imagination—be it the intelligently organized work of an artist, or the spontaneous fabrication of a dreamer—comes to the percipient as an experience, a qualitative direct datum. And any emotional import conveyed by it is perceived just as directly; that is why poetic presentation is often said to have an 'emotional quality' " (FF 241). If art qualifies as a type of experience, then the earliest myths also qualify as experiences, modes of experiencing the self through the performance of the myth. As late as 1200 B.C. the Babylonian Epic of Creation was performed in the context of rituals. Langer's new ideas on myth reveal how the feeling of primitives becomes expressed in a form so that the new self-knowledge can increase their ability to function. Writing about the problems of the tribal or cult dance, Langer claims they "create a play of forces that confronts the percipient instead of engulfing him, as it does when he is dancing" (FF 200). This view is consistent with that of Mr. and Mrs. Henri A. Frankfort: mythical imagery "represents the form in which the experience has become conscious" (Before Philosophy, London: Penguin, 1949, 22). The experience of myth is a revelation, not unlike the surprise a baby gets when seeing itself in a mirror or picture. MYTHS AS METAPHORS OF BODILY FEELING AND INNER AWARENESS Langer discusses myth to understand the origins of art, even to see art in the period of its gestation. Also, myth provides the natural materials for literature (FF 274). The finished product of myth becomes the raw material for literature. This idea is so close to Cassirer's that Langer's could be an unacknowledged continuation of passages in The Logic of the Humanities. Cassirer believes artists feel so confined by the conventional forms of the language they are writing it because of the sense of "novel and disinct feelings for life" which, permeating the language though only implicitly, as if between the lines of a text, arouse "all the unrecognized energies slumbering within it" (LH 199). In this passage Cassirer explains that the new feeling "becomes a construction of novel form" through poetry and

Myth Is a "Form of Feeling "

295

literature, having the power to change everyday speech—vocabulary, syntax, style. Sensing this feeling in the language and in life that is greater than an individual person's joys or sorrows, writers use this mythic material as the basis for aristic creation. Cassirer bases some of this idea on Avy Warburg's idea of "feeling formulas," meaning certain ways of saying something, painting something, or certain situations in literature which evoke the same emotions again and again in works through generations (202). Avy Warburg showed how for certain typical, ever-recurring situations the ancients created specific pregnant forms of expression. It is not simply that certain inner excitations, certain tensions and resolutions are firmly adhered to; it is as if later artists are under their spell. Wherever the same feeling is suggested the old image which his art creates comes to life again. It arises, according to Warburg's expression, from determinate "feeling formulas" indelibly stamped in the human memory (LH 202).

These ideas serve as the model for Langer: the mythical feeling of life provides the material from which art creates its forms. In the terms feeling and form are united the two senses of "aesthetic," meaning what is felt and what has beautiful form. Art formalizes the feeling in myth. Certainly, Langer's view seems to build on those ideas that Cassirer and Warburg express by extending the idea of feeling to a more physical or bodily sense. Instead of beginning with new feeling as coming into being through mythical images, as Cassirer does, Langer speculates that myths themselves have a deeper source in the feeling of the human body, acting as an unconscious metaphor for nature and the gods. Such a view obviates any discussion about the personification of nature or the correspondence of myths to physical reality. Any epistemological problems concerning a possible dissociation between subject and object are obviated. At first both nature and the gods acting in it are only knowable through the medium, the metaphor of the human feeling which they give form to: The conception of "powers" in nature operating like impulses, and of force inhering in things as strength is felt to be in the body, is an obvious one. Yet it is a myth, built on the most primitive symbol—the body (just as most of our descriptive language is based on the symbolism of head and foot, leg and arm, mouth, neck, back, etc.: the "foothills" of a range, the mountain's "shoulder," the "leg" of a triangle, the

296

Cassirer and Langer on Myth "bottleneck," the "headland," etc). This envisagement of the world as a realm of individual living forces, each a being with desires and purposes that bring it into conflict with other teleologically directed powers, is really the key idea of all mythical interpretations: the idea of the Spirit World (FF 188).

Myths are metaphors or mirrors of the concrete physical feeling in primitives. They present in figurative form their bodily reactions to natural stimuli, soft or hard, hot or cold; their emotions, fear or desire; their sensory images, large or small, fragrant or smelly; and their bodily reactions in the form of kinaesthetic feelings of the whole body's position or motion. They are a spontaneous, unconscious connection between inner or subjective psychological experience and the outer objective reality of nature. In 1974, twenty years after Feeling and Form, Langer finds a source in Cassirer's writing for this idea of the unconscious, metaphorical character of spontaneous symbol formation ("De Profundis" 454). THE ROOT OF MYTH IN FEELING: "CHAPTER 12. THE MAGIC CIRCLE" Literally, empirically, "the magic circle" refers to a circle of primitives dancing ritually. The chapter explains why dance develops before other arts, even on a mythical level, a question which Langer regards as important for her entire theory of art (FF ix). It also explains how mythical experience becomes artistic eventually. What is more, it defines the origin of myth more fully than Cassirer does: the origin is in bodily feeling. The chapter is a way of developing her theory of myth according to the new idea that feeling is implicit form and has the spontaneous tendency to become manifest in forms. Dance is an excellent topic for her explaining how primitive feeling becomes formed. But in the first stages of imagination, no such definite forms embody the terrible and fecund Powers that surround humanity. The first recognition of them is through the feeling of personal power and will in the human body and their first representation is through a bodily activity which abstracts the sense of power from the practical experiences in which that sense is usually an obscure factor. This activity is known as "dancing." The dance creates an image of nameless and even bodiless Powers filling a complete, autonomous realm, a "world." It is the first presentation of the world as a realm of mystic forces. This explains the

Myth Is a "Form of Feeling"

297

early development of dance as a complete and even sophisticated art form (FF 190).

Through time dancing becomes developed—the movements become more formalized, stylized, and the gradual appearance of an audience of fellow tribe members is a partial step toward distinguishing the form of the dance movements from the meaning of the myth presented through it (FF 198). The discussion of dance reveals ideas about the primitive mind. Through dance, claims Langer, the senses of space and time are enhanced, changed, evolved (FF 198-204). The music or singing requires some attention to the timing of the body and the movements with respect to the others gives them a sense of area through which the body moves. The senses of time and space are influenced by the time and space of the story, which has larger dimensions in meaning. The circle of people is magical because gods are presented and primitives enter into a direct relation to them, something they previously did only in their daytime reveries. The event is sacred, different from daily activities. The circle gives a community feeling while also suggesting the unity of the cosmos in the following way (FF 206). The performance leads the primitives spontaneously and unconsciously to pool together their formerly separate fantasies about the cosmic process. In this way the world of their thoughts gains greater unity through a specific form. Individual fantasies are complemented, changed, and completed into a whole story by the community. The dance and any myth developing with it are the creations of the community, not a personal imagination—rather what might be called a collective imagination. Dancing has the epistemological function of giving the primitives a sense of a world through muscular action (FF 197). Each dancer sees the whole dance around him/her, and each "sees the world in which his [her] body dances." The dance is a natural metaphor for the domain of the human body in space. This discussion calls to mind the modern term "body image": each person has a sense of seeing their own body from a global perspective, from the outside, as others would see him/her. Actors cultivate this sense, or any people performing in public. Langer is telling us, by the way, that human beings had to come to the ability to imagine their own bodies. A definite body image is an achievement learned on a certain level of abstraction. The dance at first gives form to fairly isolated feeling qualities: the terror at thunder, the fear of animals, the desire for meat, and so on. Various feeling qualities become more and more related through the dance.

298

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Dance transports the dancers from a profane to a sacred state (FF 201). Due to the holiness the bodily movements have a great deal of mental attention focused on them and equally it is the repetition and the increased attention it permits that helps to create a sense of greater importance, of something that is holy. Eventually, the dance presents more and more feelings woven into myths performed through the dance. But then a change can occur. Langer believes the dance becomes truly artistic, artistic in a modern sense, when there is no function of the dance to present reality directly, to embody a spirit (FF 207). At this stage the myth is sufficiently developed to have independent meaning. A fairly high level of abstraction has been achieved representing the limit of myth. At first, the primitives really do think the gods are among them during the dance but, when primitives come to understand that the dance is done only for the movements, not for the hypostatic function of creating some other reality, then belief becomes appreciation, aesthetic enjoyment. Not a "world of vital forces" but "an expressive form" is presented (FF 193). The dance is no longer needed to present a world through myth, because it has raised the level of mind, enabling other means to develop so that they might present a world. The function of art becomes separate from other cognitive activities while in myth it is still so undeveloped as to be indistinguishable. MYTH AS A PREPARATION FOR ART Feeling and Form develops the ideas on myth in Philosophy in a New Key. Myths are symbolic forms that present the structure of feeling, which has its roots in the body. Their images "evoke, center and hold conceptions far beyond the range of anyone's thinking—perhaps before verbal thinking, that is, before speech" ("De Profundis" 451). Just as the primitive images spontaneously—unintentionally—become woven together into myths, the myths tend to become united in a single universal myth culminating in Greek epic poetry and cosmology. These facts show the inherent evolutionary character of myth evident in its integration of all ideas into one account of the world. In this way it is similar to art, which educates feeling, according to Langer: myth presents the structure of feeling, increases self-knowledge, and thereby produces new feeling in evolving cycles throughout history. The function of myth to make a worldview is obvious when the goal of the most developed myths is taken into account.

CHAPTER 13

Myth Has a Biological Basis The Underlying Physical Processes "Despite the vastness of time and change that must have prepared what we call 'the Mind' today, I hold that the elements of that marvelous structure may all be found in nature, and the principles of its formation are those of organic chemistry, electrochemical action, or whatever substitutes for such current concepts the progress of scientific thought may dictate in future. If this is an audacious assumption, I can only plead that it seems to me the most promising to open, and keep open, a way to a rational concept of human mentality" (Mind III, 89).

"Mind is a natural phenomenon," claims Langer (Mind III, 219). Many philosophers have spent their lives trying to prove the opposite, to raise the human mind out of the mere order of biological life into the order of an eternal spiritual existence. She develops this thesis on a grand scale in what she planned to be the crowning achievement of a life's work. Not as popular as Philosophy in a New Key was, Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling Volumes I and II (1967 and 1972) were nonetheless nominated for National Book Awards. The final volume, III, was published in 1982. The number of references to research in many scholarly fields is impressive and authoritative—quite an unusual practice for a philosopher, except for one of her two main teachers, Cassirer. As is customary with the works of Langer, one book develops from its predecessor. If Feeling and Form looks for a cause of mythical symbols, and finds it in the idea of the transformation of feeling, then Mind looks one step deeper for the cause of feeling (Mind I, xviii). The task is suggested already in Feeling and Form where it is stated that art and myth cannot be translated into discursive symbolisms because the former structure areas of experience—feeling—that are not directly accessible to the discursive mind (FF 241). Only the means of myth, religion, the arts, and to a lesser extent some uses of language can create and make us aware of feelings. By "feeling" she means a range of experiences: 299

300

Cassirer and Langer on Myth the rhythms of life, organic, emotional and mental (the rhythm of attention is an interesting link among them all), which are not simply periodic, but endlessly complex, and sensitive to every sort of influence. All together they compose the dynamic pattern of feeling. It is this pattern that only non-discursive symbolic forms can present, and that is the point and purpose of artistic construction (FF 241).

In other passages the list includes other qualities, including emotions, subjective traits, and values. Mind develops her theory of art in three main ways. Perhaps the most important is the desire to generalize the principles of the theory to include science and discursive symbolisms (Mind I, xx). Although she does use a great number of scientific researches in the writing of the work, there are few pages actually explaining scientific symbolism. Secondly, the process of feeling changing into form becomes clearer, more detailed (Mind I, 77). The process is a feedback mechanism for the organism to know how to adapt. As a third development, she claims that some of the form in myth and art must be determined by the biological functioning of people; the way the minds and nervous systems of humans work makes the feelings partially what they are. Hominids, according to Langer, could only have developed the symbolic capacity if the senses and memory relate to each other in some new way, as we shall see (PS 23). Abstraction begins in the eye (53). THE PLAN OF THE THREE VOLUMES The thesis of these 1,150 pages, is to explain mind as a natural phenomenon. In general the idea of the project is reminiscient of Whitehead's idea that mind is a property of all living things and even all inanimate things, though in a very low degree. This apparent pantheism would be dismissed quickly by many a modern mind, who would also find it peculiar coming from a famous mathematician. Langer does not make such a strong claim, though, as her famous teacher. She only claims that the human mind (not just brain) is possible because of its distinctive biological make-up. The method is to use a large variety of researches in human evolution and relate their findings. It is believed that the thesis will be stronger if the scope of the discussion is on a grand scale, and this makes sense because at some point hominids started to have culture and this point is a distinct phase of their biological evolution. It is logical to include biological and other empirical studies to come to understand the advent of symbolism.

Myth Has a Biological Basis

301

Volume I develops a theory of acts evolving out of feeling. Part I contains the author's reflection on feeling in animals as opposed to humans. Langer considers methods for understanding the transition more clearly. Part II is entitled 'The Import of Art." This discussion has the aim of speaking about art in such a way that the principles could be general enough to apply to science. She discusses art through Langer's ideas of projection, abstraction, and living form, even though there are few references to science. Part III, called "Natura Naturans," a Latin term used by Spinoza, meaning that nature is naturing or making itself. The aim is to describe how the behavior of the lower organisms can evolve to such a level that the continuous stream of its relation to the environment can be divided into individual acts. This ability represents a greater power of adaptation to the environment. Especially relevant to the theory of myth is the last chapter on the way higher animals relate to their environment and can be said to have acts, though not in any human way. Referring to Wolfgang Köhler's study of apes, Langer points out that "external objects enter an animal's awareness only as elements in its own acts, and in doing so are assimilated to its behavior and treated as parts of itself (Mind III, 48). It follows from Langer's ideas that in human behavior, the awareness of an external object is not merely or always practical; it may be variable, imaginary, or speculative. A stick can become a sword in the hands of an actor or a child. A television can show scenes of a tragedy but the viewer is not therefore despondent. Continuing the account of the evolution of life, Volume II, containing only Part Four: The Great Shift, describes the shift from the higher animals to humans. Langer's aim is to find the biological change that is the precondition for human symbolism. In An Essay on Man, written by Cassirer twenty years earlier, he did not deny the value of pursuing empirical researches into the origin of human symbolism, though he did not do so as far as Langer does in Mind. Indeed, much new research was completed after Cassirer's book. The final volume of Mind was published almost forty years after that book of Cassirer, during which time the sciences progressed considerably. By far, Volume III is the most significant for an understanding of Langer's theory of myth, for in it human culture is discussed. A rather thorough discussion of the evolution of myth, language, religion, preliminary art, and ritual is included. Her aim was to complete the three-volume study with a full discussion of modern science but unfortunately ill health due to old age and impending blindness curtailed the account very much. Part IV, Mathematics and the Reign of Science, contains one chapter called "The Open Ambient."

302

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The study breaks new ground in myth theory insofar as its biological basis is explained. Other thinkers have suggested this idea of the isomorphism in human biology and culture. In semiotics, G. Prodi suggested "bio-logic is the materialistic foundation of the cultural logic."1 Nobel Prize winner George Beadle suggests the same dependence of culture on biology.2 THE BIOLOGICAL PRECONDITION OF HUMAN SYMBOLISM Much of the success of the three-volume project rests on her explaining the transition from animals to humans much more fully than Cassirer did, and the fuller explanation requires recourse to the biological preconditions making symbolism possible—the material foundations for what really amounts to a change in behavior and felt state. Not all of the ideas will be discussed here; only those most relevant to a thorough understanding of Langer's theory of myth. The biological changes helped to bring about a qualitative shift in behavior: animal memory is not just less than the human, it is different in its operation, in its role in behavior. Langer does not claim to present all the biological changes leading to the material foundation for symbolism. There is not just one cause, nor is the sequence of changes as regular as a chemical transformation. "The making of mind has been such a weaving of coincidences, asynchronous changes and readjustments, and especially chance opportunities for new realizations of potential acts that it is only after the whole forgoing survey of animal life that this strangest of vital phenomena—Mind—can appear in its biological setting . .." (Mind III, 90). In general, the body of primates changed hand in hand with the functioning of its parts. Concerning the parts, the posture became erect; the proportion and use of the anatomy—in particular the hands— changed; and the brain evolved. These factors evolved together not in a one-way simple series of causation. In general, organisms evolve through a specialization of their parts to achieve better functioning within the whole organism in its adaptation to the environment (PS 138). "The overdevelopment and progressive specialization of the brain" changed perception and behavior (Mind III, 45). All parts of the brain changed until the responses "split up into distinct and separately evocable acts," thus helping to bring about unprecedented intracerebral activity of a new kind (76). The opercular lobes of the human brain became overgrown and hyperactive in relation to the use of the limbs (94). The

Myth Has a Biological Basis

303

cerebral cortex also became overgrown and hyperactive, outstripping the needs of the body to adapt to its environment (124). But the activity of the brain continued, creating a wealth of intracerebral acts. The start of the symbolic instinct is described in these biological terms: the activity of the cerebral cortex outruns the needs of the animal organism. . . . For no matter how adequately those needs are met, the great neural complex does not come to rest; it goes on producing its figments, dreams and thoughts, wishes and emotions, apparently below as well as above the fluctuating limen of feeling. The possibilities of varying, combining, and deriving further images and conceptions from prior intracerebral acts are practically endless, and lead the brain on to more and more symbolic play. But every act also leaves its trace in the action-built matrix, the physical organism; every metabolic rhythm in its somatic structure, and especially every behavioral act, from a while performacne down to each muscular movement or tension, inscribes itself on the cumulative formation of the historic individual. And so does every act of mentation. Since countless mental acts are started and finished in the brain, their main effects are likely to be on that organ (Mind III, 94).

The environment, the structure of the body and especially the brain, and the function of its parts all interplay to bring about evolution. The mutual change of structure and function is described by Langer in these words: "this rather technical example .. . illustrates as clearly as possible what I think is a universal principle of evolution: the differentiation of forms to the smallest functional subunits, and after that a shift offunctions to entirely new, unpredictably different, big subunits, made out of the smallest ones by a new process which starts here—integration. A reversal of the progressive individuation takes place. Old processes give way to new modes of operation proper to the newly integrated organic structures" (PS 135). Langer often refers to a general principle of biological evolution: there are "shifts of functions from old to new mechanisms which occur as the old ones develop to their limit of complexity and refinement, the point of physiological overelaboration and overresponsiveness" (PS 75). In the shift of functions new goals for them do sometimes arise as they did when the cerebral cortex and other brain parts became so overdeveloped that their functioning changed to include a large number of intracerebral acts

304

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

and a new mode of neural transmission within the brain and to the body (PS 70). Two types of change in mental functioning that enabled prehumans to begin behaving symbolically are the following. First of all, the wealth of intracerebral activity and the change in the transmission of the neural messages initiated the "spontaneous transfer of situational response from one sensory mode to another, i.e. from their body sense to their visual sense" (Mind III, 46). This "relationship of different sensory fields" is perhaps the most important in Langer's view, as she mentions it in many contexts and derives from it specific symbolic behavior.3 This capacity of intracerebral activity allows sensations, percepts, memories, and any other psychic content in the brain to change each other, synthesize, and present themselves at times in an order established by the brain's more unconscious processes, as in dreams (PS 23). Langer even speculates about the stages in the ability to transfer—almost translate—meaning from one sense organ into any or all of the others; she believes the private mental image first developed through the visual system before it was extended to include the production of private imagery through the vocal apparatus (PS 49). These changes are significant for myth and art. This spontaneous transfer between the senses of any sensory, perceptual or psychic content permits the distinctly human ability to "project" its feeling into external objects, both real and only apparent. Köhler's apes lack this ability (Mind III, 46). Projection is a key idea in Langer's theory of art: feeling can become presented in an artwork through projection. Volume I of Mind discusses this idea that explains her theory of art in Feeling and Form more. Primitives do this, too, in their symbolic behavior. Also based on the empirical studies of the brain's evolution, abstraction may depend upon the ability of the brain to separate meaning from one sensory apparatus and keep it distinct (Mind III, 208). Another important point for the theory of myth is the presence today of biological functioning developed in primitive people. Although the changes occurred thousands of years ago, some perhaps begun even hundreds of thousands ago, biological evolution is comparatively slow for the life-span of an individual human being, and consequently the biological condition of the brain at the time of the first symbolic transformations initiating human culture probably remains fairly intact, perhaps very slightly more active in cerebral function. (Mind III, 20). This point is important for the theory of myth because it should address itself to the issue of the presence of myths in modern life.

Myth Has a Biological Basis

305

In Langer's view, a new imaginative activity, a new functioning of the brain, if only a set of new pathways of neural transmission, can remain unconscious a long time before it becomes a feeling and directs the behavior of a person in a new way (Mind III, 180). Principles of biological evolution provide a model for cultural evolution in Langer's view. She believes the processes in individual organisms are the same or similar to the processes in human culture across many generations. We find progressive differentiation, breaking up into subunits, various races of man—a breaking up that we usually cannot trace, but reconstruct after the fact—then further divisions into smaller subunits effected mainly by circumstances which isolate or assemble hereditary lines, forming natural groups—tribes, families—sometimes confluent lines, equally natural expanded groups, such as clans and peoples, and nations. The constitutive units in such groups usually keep some of their identity, as the twelve tribes of Israel and the various familial stocks of the vikings did for a long time. On such historic foundations, dynasties, classes, castes, and other social divisions are based. Human groups uphold their singleness, their individuation, more fiercely than groups of any other species, because they not only feel but conceive their identity (PS 136).

These processes of cultural evolution resemble the progressive specialization and individuation of anatomical parts and the complementary integration of the parts into a organism with a modified overall functioning; these processes characterize the change in the prehuman body. A similar idea of the repetition of the processes of the evolution of biology in the evolution of human culture was proposed by the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber (1901-1951), author of The Nature of Culture.4 He defines an idea of human culture as the "superorganic," meaning culture is a modification in the functioning of a physical organism. The consequence for social science is that some of the principles of culture could be explained on the basis of the lower evolutionary level of animals—before human culture—while other principles could not. This idea is consistent with Langer's that there are qualitative shifts in the history of humanity, and this idea is based on an analogy with the qualitative shifts in evolutionary biology.

306

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

THE MAJOR SHIFTS FROM MYTH TO MODERN CIVILIZATION Part V of Mind, called "The Moral Structure," discusses human culture with its unique sense of morals. Etymologically, the term "moral" used to mean spiritual or human qualities as opposed to qualities of inanimate things or of animals. Gradually, its usage was limited to ethical matters. Central to the third volume is the idea of five qualitative shifts in the functioning of human beings throughout their rise to modern civilization, shifts in morals or values by which people live, also called "phylogenetic steps." The first four are all mythical in the broad sense of Cassirer's idea of a mythical consciousness. Myth does remain on the level of civilization, but it is a topic of other studies by Langer. Myth is not the central subject of the study: mind as a natural phenomenon is; however, most of human culture is explained through its early phases when presentational symbolism was dominant, and Langer had studied this type much more throughout her life. The five qualitative shifts are the following: The advent of human speech in Chapter 19 called "The Spirit-World; the stage of fantasy in Chapter 20 called "The Dream of Power"; the rise of ritual in Chapter 21 called "Dream's Ending: The Tragic Vision"; the development of tribal feeling in Chapter 22 called "The Ethnic Balance"; and finally the start of civilization in Chapter 23 called "The Breaking" [of the old tribal bonds and their replacement]. While based on empirical research, the idea of the qualitative shifts is idealistic to some extent. She does not believe it is possible to state the date in history when some of the shifts take place (not even for a particular culture) (Mind III, 106). This fact makes the shifts correspond to a level of thinking rather than an actual period of history, and these levels may overlap one another, the new one emerging out of the old, and the old one remaining on the lower levels of an actual culture for some time. Langer's idea of a qualitative shift is idealistic in a second way. Sometimes, the classification of cultural phenomena on the five different levels may seem unclear or questionable. Ritual can be found on all the levels, albeit ritual with different meanings. I do not think she defines the level with the aim in mind that the definitions are operational meaning that they allow others to classify all phenomena. Her aim is more general: at each of the five qualitatively different levels to show the mind to be a natural phenomenon. If she can make the connection at each level, if culture can be shown to reflect biology, then her efforts are generally successful.

Myth Has a Biological Basis

307

Considered in another way, what appears to be some ambiguity in the classification of mythical phenomena on the five cultural levels is actually a feature of the continuity of cultures. Within any culture there are levels of development of the individuals and their groups. The less developed of them will retain old ways of thinking, while the most developed will have new ways. Then, for example, a ritual performed in a society will have a range of meaning even within a society. Of course, the degree of difference in interpretation increases with the stratification of society (Mind III,37). The qualitative shifts are somewhat like changes in generative ideas: some phenomena have the same name but all have a different meaning, slight at first and more as time goes along. THE BEHAVIORAL CHANGE FROM ANIMAL TO HUMAN: THE MAKING OF A WORLD The biological changes necessary to make animals into humans has been discussed. One concomitant behavioral change needs to be emphasized: the making of a world out of a mere environment. Langer claims the way the brain processes sensory stimuli allows it to be spontaneously interrelated in ways not possible for animals. By analogy, she believes the unity of a world is possible because humans can understand one thing in another; the fur of an animal can be the coat of a person; the fur in a photograph of a woman wearing it looks soft and inviting, showing an interrelation of the senses of sight and touch, even a transfer of meaning (PS 154). This monumental change in behavior constitutes a change as significant as that of animal life from plant life or plant life from onecelled organisms and, since it is a feature of all the qualitative shifts in human evolution, a preliminary discussion can clarify the more specific treatment of the shifts. The basic building block of a world as opposed to a mere environment is a symbol (PS 65-66). A world includes much more content and content of a different type than a mere environment: the past, the future, the possible, the variable use of things, and the awareness of inner states, from emotions to values. A subject in the human sense can only exist when choices can be made about alternative actions. The making of a world, then, represents an increase on the power of prehuman animals in their environment; behavior and the environment can be altered more than ever before. Tools come into use, as does primitive art on cave walls. Langer's theory of symbolism depends on an assumption of the

308

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

wholistic character of human meaning. Cultures, she points out, are like different worlds in contrast to one another—relatively self-contained domains of meaning (PS 98). This analogy of worlds and cultures shows the fact that human meaning requires the interrelationship of many different meanings. This assertion is tantamount to the idea that there is not just one symbol; one symbol does not exist by itself but only in a context of other ones which it suggests. Langer explains the world-making power of symbols : Yet words do organize our thinking around centered conceptual symbols, however vague those central images or other carriers of meaning may be, and define a context in which that core of meaning is embedded; it is the contexts which are not at all a logician's ideal. Each word, according to its grammatical form and syntactical position, immediately determines its own transitory context.. . (Mind III, 207-08).

Just as the first images record a total impression of an experience in a specific trait represented in a perceptible form—fear at the sound of thunder, so too the first words already belong in a context through which they have their meaning; there are no clear definitions of words unless other words are used to do this. The creation of words follows soon after the creation of images. Furthermore, different languages exhibit different ways of ordering space, time, gender relations, and all other features of a world. In Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Volume I: Language

there are several hundred examples showing this and Langer refers to Cassirer's study as well as other ones. In another way, the building of a world through symbols is essential to all human meaning, no matter what level of evolution, if there is to be cumulative progress. Symbols accumulate perhaps an endless amount of previous learning into each one (Mind III, 211). She points out how much learning went into the development of the decimal number system and the same applies to the alphabet and to the words of ordinary language or to any symbol whatsoever. The learning of the entire race is condensed through symbols insofar as it takes a person less time than it did the previous generations of people. Someone can rise to the forefront of all human knowledge in some specific area in just a few years of one lifetime. This fact shows that worlds of meaning can be epitomized in symbolism, or else the human race would have to begin all over with each new birth and repeat the length of the process of development. In addition the variability of symbols, their capacity to be redefined, allows

Myth Has a Biological Basis

309

knowledge to be accumulated. An example given by Langer is the role of ritual to be a "scaffolding" in which all more advanced religion will take shape (Mind III, 142). Langer believes the behavioral achievement of making a world order brings with it the power to change oneself. The ideas about the world as a whole are metaphors of the activity of the mind: mirrors of the way it is working. By thinking about a world, people can understand the processes of their own minds and change them. The implicit presence of the functioning of the mind in each of its products is like some modern ideas in genetics. Langer points out the analogy of her idea about the evolutionary process of world making and genetics when she writes, "the internal bonding of an organism by the repetition of its genome in every cell" (Mind III, 120). The possibility of epitomizing the mind's workings in a few principles goes hand in hand with the symbol's power to condense more and more meaning within it. THE BEHAVIORAL CHANGE FROM ANIMAL TO HUMAN: GIVING AN ACCOUNT OF THE WORLD AND ONESELF In Langer's theory, rituals do not just follow a pattern of a world or society, rituals make and renew it (Mind III, 129). The fact that the mind's workings become accessible in a perceptible symbolic form—that mind makes a mirror so that it can know itself—is evident in the inseparable mixture of ritual and daily life. One problem scholars have had is to explain the fantastic seemingly incongruous behavior in rituals with the sensible knowledge needed for survival in daily life. Elaborate blessings, ceremonies, or magic can accompany the most ordinary activities such as the planting of yams (Mind III, 33-34). According to Langer there are not two kinds of knowledge at work but only one. Even when the ceremonies are not being conducted at the moment, when a primitive is carving a canoe, she believes the wood and the knife and the river have a different significance than they would for the modern mind. Then, it follows from her view that the problem arises because of the anachronism of our modern thinking, an inability to think back to a previous level of mind and to reconstruct it faithfully. One argument she gives is that primitives do not attempt to test the role of rituals accompanying daily work. When asked what would happen if the rituals are not performed a primitive merely replies that something would go wrong: what would go wrong cannot be stated. The precise relation of the rituals to the daily work is not an issue because they are seen to belong within the same

310

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

order of meaning. Planting yams is not an entirely secular experience; indeed the distinction between ritual acts and daily work is a product of postmythical thinking. There is a biological basis for the necessary development of an account of the world with that world lived in. Behavior begins to change to show its own features. There is "the tendency of habitual animal acts to become formalized, which supplies strict repetitious patterns of movement apart from immediate, close-fitted stimulations, and the fact that the expressive acts are visible to the performer and his fellows so that they, and he himself, experience the influence of a powerful suggestion" (Mind III, 32). In Langer's view, behavior on a human level must form accounts of itself that appear in actions, such as ritual (PNK 45). Mind is self-conscious: it acts in such a way that the form of its own activity becomes present to itself; its products reflect the process of their formation. "One has to realize, above all," claims Langer, "that a fundamental attitude of mind entrains and encourages particular mental acts which are in harmony with it" (Mind III, 10). In her theory of mind, the same human capacity for self-consciousness is present at a more rudimentary level in muscles. Without a sense of a particular muscle, a total movement using it could not be guided toward some complex even imaginary goal. Animals cannot perform merely imaginary movements which have not practical significance (doing tricks for food is practical). They cannot pretend to knock on a door which is not there, but humans can, and this ability shows the incorporation of muscular feeling in an action entirely designed by the person. The idea of the whole movement guides the muscular movements at each moment. On a more biological level, organisms can function because each part has in it the instructions of the whole; the human genome is present in every cell (Mind III, 120). This is something like saying that a postal address contains part of an idea of what a postal system is, or else the postal worker could not know the meaning of the address and how to sort the piece of mail. If an organ is to work in concert with others, it must have a sense of what the others are doing. When behavior is no longer determined solely by the immediate stimulus in the environment, then the mind has a freedom with respect to stimuli. Some traits of the stimuli can be selected out of the total indistinct complex from the environment; the memory of some regularity or particularly intense aspect of an experience helps in the process of selecting only some traits; then they can be altered in imagination (a stick is seen as a tool, a weapon, a spirit).

Myth Has a Biological Basis

311

"THE SPIRIT-WORLD" In this first qualitative shift marking the start of human nature, imagination begins to change animal behavior. The achievement is the creation of images and words. The title shows that there is no clear distinction between the self and external objects as there is in higher levels of culture. On this level "any unusual sounds, shapes, or lights and all distinct phenomena of nature received some exciting interpretation" (Mind III, 11). Important to each of the five shifts is the biological basis of the new level of mind. On this first level, Langer's idea of "projection" indicates the basis. The changes in the brain allowing it to project its sense of bodily balance into external objects coincide with changes in perception allowing objects to reify feelings in an unconscious spontaneous process. The feeling projected into the well- or badly balanced external object comes back to its producer as an image of equilibrium, secure or precarious as it may be; the object looks centered or off-center. On the same principle all other kinesthetic, thermal, tactual, in short: corporeal feelings are "seen" in the shapes that meet our eyes, and give such shapes the meaning of spatial entities, potential opportunities for action if not actual ones at the moment; they confront us as possible implements, obstacles, more or less permanent carriers of their own qualities. The recognition of characteristics like form, relation, and every sort of meaning is the lowest denominator of intellect, the function of intuition (Mind III, 49).

From this beginning, the image is not just a copy of inner or outer experience; instead, it is a statement about some aspect of the total experience, in which inner and outer are inseparably together. Not just an indifferent copy, the image has in it feeling, attitude, and a direction of the mind's growth. The total experience determines the image, and it follows from her view that the image can present the total experience to the primitive again (FF 206). At this level of mind, the images are fairly isolated achievements until speech begins to stabilize and record them. At first experience is predominantly perceptual, with dream-like ideas and fantasies developing at the spur of the moment and forgotten almost as quickly. Later, ghost stories and animal fables are characteristic; the indifference between animate and inanimate is striking.

312

Cassirer and Langer on Myth Husko recited a tale of a chief who came upon a house in which an old woman was hopping around a fire in the center of the room, crying "Koh, koh," while she roasted human heads. The chief went back to his settlement and got his men; after they shot the demonic creature, which returned her to her true form, she proved to have been the ghost of a loom rod, an implement used in the Ainu method of mat-weaving. It had been carelessly left in the house. They found the rod with an arrow stuck in its middle (Mind III, 15).

The meaning of such stories is produced very much as it is in dreams. Principles of coherence in waking life do not apply: things change forms, disappear, and sometimes there does not seem to by any spatial or temporal connection between events. Explaining the functioning of mind at this level, Langer agrees with the view of Daniel Essertier: "in affirming anything, the mind affirms itself (Mind III, 20). For the modern mind, there is confusion because what we would call images, containing feelings and meanings, are on the same order as physical things. Besides showing the preoccupation with making images, this fact shows that images do not copy physical things. Both together show the working of the mind. The almost unintelligible stories are the first "opinions about ambient conditions, past, present, and future" (Mind III, 24-25). They are wholistic assertions about the world, revealing mind to itself. As of yet there is no system of myths in culture. Nevertheless, this level of the Spirit-World is an achievement because animals do not have a sense of past, present, and future; they do not have such a sense of what is not here; they do not have a sense of the imaginary, the merely possible. THE SECOND SHIFT: "THE DREAM OF POWER" While the previous level only produces unconscious desires and fantasies, this new level can produce the expression of those workings of the mind. The incoherent motives in earlier stories become coherent in the unity of one will. Magic, which characterizes this level of mind, reifies meaning such that its symbols show the will as a unified desire (Mind III, 80). Whereas on the previous level separate mental acts became possible and this fact was presented symbolically in stories, on this level the acts become united as an expression of will. What is more, the will is more related to external nature, less private, than it was. The magician may be acting for the good of others (Mind III, 44).

Myth Has a Biological Basis

313

An example given by Langer is from a large native population of New Guinea with a totemic system based on a sacred object for each group (Mind III, 100). Their conception of life is more communal than personal, so much so that they might be said to be careless about life. They do not have a concept of death or natural death; every one is caused magically by an enemy. Langer does not believe that the magical interpretation is a substitute for a knowledge of natural causes, nor is it an overflowing of emotion, a by-product of despair of anger (43). These explanations do not account for the fixed social position of healers, rainmakers, miracleworking priests. Also, they do not account for the popularity of magic despite its failure in modern practical terms. The world-wide presence of magic in various times and its presence in modified forms at different levels of culture suggests to Langer that its meaning is not only negative; it must perform some positive function, if only one that is eventually not needed. Langer believes magic has several purposes. It unites people and spirits. It formulates ideas and relates things in the world. It influences nature. But most of all it assures the people of their own power of mind (62). This power has its biological basis: "on the physiological level where even the highest cerebral impulses work and are felt before they take any distinct psychical form. It is the feeling of mental activity—of an invisible doing—that underlies the notion of exerting a non-mechanical influence on the course of events, without physical contact, without push or pull on the external objects and persons involved" (51). It is because of the "overactivity of the forebrain" that people feel this exertion and attribute it to something in the external world (Mind III, 59). The felt connections in the brain are hypostatized as actual ones in the world. Another biological argument is based on the instincive character of early humans. Since bees, birds, wolves, dogs, and other animals can pick up minute signals from others of their species and complete the behavior of which the signal was a part, Langer claims primitives feel they can begin an act and also have it completed by some forces external to themselves (60). In contrast to Cassirer who thought magic was "sympathetic," which term makes the bond seem conscious, Langer makes it less conscious, more instinctual. Besides magic, this level is characterized by metamorphoses of one thing into another. These changes seem nonsensical just as the apparent magical belief that a cause follows from the effect (61). Langer explains

314

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

the inconsistency by pointing out that story elements do not have to cohere with one another. The mythical mind does not as yet unite the parts systematically; it is still only concerned with producing certain centers of meaning around which some elaboration of feeling occurs. Only in later myth do the centers become more and more related and coherent. The same applies to magic. The achievement or nonachievement of the practical goal is not the point: the god may not want to participate or may not be listening. The point is the centering of the will in the personage of the god, in a context that is not merely private (32). "DREAM'S ENDING: THE TRAGIC VISION" In the earliest phases of human culture there is little sense of an individual self and comparatively little fear of personal death. When death occurs, it is denied in many ways: by making wedding plans for the deceased, talking to the dead, and thinking the dead are in the daily hunting grounds. Or death is thought to be caused magically by an enemy (Mind III, 185). This dream of limitless power, symbolized in the belief in magic, comes to an end (107). Eventually, though, the mind is able to form a concept abstract enough to admit the end of a personal life; people stop using magic to avert death (Mind III, 88 and 107). For the first time life can be thought to be a whole with an end. The gods become omnipotent and tasks can be conceived as lifelong. People continue to resist the idea in various stories about reincarnation or life after death. The shift is a development of mind because a person can understand his/her individuality more. The previous sense of consciousness was "a sense of tribal action filling each individual agent's consciousness" (118). The required ability to abstract (the idea of an end to consciousness is an abstract one, i.e. never felt, and general) is at work in other concepts as well—the conception of the omnipotence of the gods and lifelong tasks. Then, the qualitative shift involves a generative idea. Some new symbols develop. Since the relation of people to the gods becomes more subjective, and since rites are not done only for the public good but for the private as well, a new type of god appears (111-113). In previous culture divinities were more particular, belonging to specific places or known especially in connection with particular things, gods of the sea or the woods or of marriage (25). People acquire particular guardian ancestors or ghosts to help them. There are also more universal gods who, during the course of this phase of development, tend to merge

Myth Has a Biological Basis

315

into one all-powerful source. Consistent with these religious ideas, life can be judged as a single act (116). The way is prepared for a development of a sense of personal morality. What makes this possible is a transference of the idea of the sacred from many external gods to fewer gods and to the importance of a person's life. Langer claims the sacred is what gives people the sense of the world as a whole, which in turn gives them a sense of the workings of their own minds (Mind III, 25). A person's life becomes a serious, sacred act. A fine example of this level of mind occurs in Greek tragedy, in which life is conceived as a single act: "Its form is one overarching parabolic curve from youth to death—symbolically, of course, from birth or even conception, through the prime of life, to its close. The 'fatal error' committed by the protagonist is not a realistic story element but a dramatic device to signify the turning-point from the expanding, upward course to the downward, the cadence, literally the 'descent' " (109). The use of a stage shows the singularity of the entire life (110). Langer explains the biological basis of this level in the following way: This emergence of biological form into feeling comes with the progressive elaboration of mental acts, as they have to adjust to their own increase by more and more integration and mutual concession; so, with evolutionary advance, th fabric of cerebral acts becomes so closewoven that it makes the individuated mental life seem like a single, allembracing act" (102).

"THE ETHNIC BALANCE" Once having conceived the idea of a life as a single act, a primitive can advance to the more complex notion of responsibility in the community of such individuals (Mind III, 120). Society still overpowers the sense of selfhood in a way it does not in modern life. In the consciousness of the primitive "the group is all that claims him. But the fact is that he can shift his explicit allegiance from one body to another—from his tribe to his race, or to a mystic brotherhood, or even his family—and somehow the sense of it is always the same, a greater life. The symbolic office of the greater body to which he gives himself is manifested only in his emotion toward it, which would be inexplicable if that body were a purely practical arrangement to implement common affairs" (PS 138). Society retains a sacred, unquestioned status.

316

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The "ethnic balance" means the balance between "the drives of mental individuation and the integrity of the biological continuum" (Mind III, 125). Perhaps the oldest rite related to this level of mind is "sacrifice," which means "making sacred" (Mind III, 132). It expresses the responsibility of the individual to his/her kind (Mind III, 133). Of course, sacrifice is practiced in such a wide range of manners throughout human history, and Langer is aware of this range of meanings. I belief the fact that it has acquired so many meanings shows that there is something universal about it. Circumcision has a similar function to restore the ethnic balance of the individual developing mind. She mentions various theories, such as the test of fortitude, which cannot be always true because circumcision is practiced on babies, and the increase of sexual pleasure, which cannot be true because it causes the opposite as well, great pain. Langer proposes that the act shows the branding of the individual by society, an explanation that has the advantage of also applying to other phenomena, such as tatoos, branding, cutting, and so on (Mind III, 128). There is a biological basis for this type of thinking. Just as the individual seeks the highest individuation, the brain strives, unintentionally, to make itself independent in its functioning, and to produce functioning only with itself (125). In each individual life, a person comes to learn the ways of tradition, passing through initiation rites. Ontogeny repeats phylogeny. In this way the individual biological life comes to sense a greater personal continuity, enhanced by the sense of continuing past society and being continued by it (117). The individual has a responsibility to its kind. The furthest development of the tragic vision of life is in the Greek conception of Moira, Fate. It is a difficult conception for the mythical thinker to achieve because it is "abstract" for it, meaning general and meaning that it lacks obvious metaphors in physical things, as fire is for change or destruction (Mind III, 144). The concept expresses that something is going to happen—death—that is not within the control of the individual, and in the earliest phases with lower abilities in abstraction the fate would afflict a household, a family, not just a person. For Langer this concept represents the limit of myth, as it does for Cassirer, because the sense of law is still expressed in a personal figure, the three fates in Hesiod's writings, and because the person does not yet have full freedom to choose what to be; something still controls the person's future. The self does not know itself to be independent and in fact then it is not yet developed enough to be so.

Myth Has a Biological Basis

317

"THE BREAKING": END OF THE TRIBAL PATTERN OF SOCIETY With the breaking of the tribal pattern of society a new one based on a leader and citizens arises called "civilization." Dating back 3,000 years, it brings with it the building of cities, the earliest of which, Jericho, dates to the eighth millenium B.C., not to mention the increasing development of moral codes. Part V of Mind is called the moral structure and so the last phase of mind shows the end toward which it develops: moral values. Some evidence for the fact that this is an evolutionary step is that several types of government replace the tribal one, and cities have arisen for various reasons, but they have all tended toward a uniformity (155). This last phase of mind seems disproportionately long in relation to the previous ones. Were the developments for the last 3,000 years less of a qualitative shift than those of the 3,000 years before it? Civilization means society is governed more consciously. Instead of the family groups and lines of descent, leaders are chosen by a decision or by force. Langer describes this shift with the forceful term "breaking" because it contrasts with a main term on the previous level, namely ethnic balance. The balance is broken, sometimes from within by the natural timely processes of development, sometimes more abruptly by the first contact with a foreign culture due to the precariousness of the balance, sometimes by the greater force of a "civilizing" culture (189). Also, the term "breaking" may indicate that the onset of civilization, the building of cities and the control of some people by others, can be a breaking, imbalancing force. Instead of giving several examples of the wonders of the world, the achievements of civilization, Langer discusses the imbalances in several civilizations: of the Egyptians, of the Incas, and the Aztecs. This phase of mind is defined by the transition from the ideal of unlimited power to that of intensified, ever-lasting life (Mind III, 150). The most often mentioned symbol is the pyramid: an image of supreme power that becomes unending life for the Pharaohs. In a way the unending life is gained for the people, too, who belong to the dynasties that will go on and on. A kind of imbalance afflicts this early civilization. The Pharaoh is a supreme representative individual while the subjects virtually have no individual identity according to Langer:

318

Cassirer and Langer on Myth Many prehistorians have reasoned that a task force great enough to move the stones of most megalithic monuments must certainly have required a director who was obeyed by the individuals performing the work. But that is probably to misconstrue the consciousness of the actors, who did not feel themselves as individuals with their own ideas, but plunged into the work as one falls into a rhythm struck by a distant parade band even before being aware of having heard it. True savages are not aware of themselves, but of hauling the heaviest objects they can move; they are demonstrating their power. The structure they are erecting probably takes shape in their minds as it does so for their eyes (Mind III, 179).

This passage expresses a biological basis for the rise of civilization: the individuation of the organism is the goal of the species ("the speciation of the race") and in civilization this possibility in relation to the whole society is determined by law. The polar difference between the Pharaoh and the slaves has a biological parallel for Langer in the idea that many biological functions are limited by other ones that necessarily allow them to function (194). In this way the opposition cannot be eliminated without eliminating the function; the fate of the two is to some extent common. In human biology, of course, it was the brain that some scientists speculate can present a threat to the organism's survival due to its overdevelopment. In the case of the Egyptians, the Pharaoh carried on the mental individuation for the species in one person (164-5). Langer believes the regularity of the life around the Nile helped to create the cultural conditions in which all the common Egyptians and slaves endured a life of minimal individuality. It is characteristic of the level of civilization that mind has to assert itself against its indifferent life within the tribal feeling (164). The imbalance of the Pharaoh in relation to the slaves in terms of individuation may be related to a more cultural imbalance in that society. Langer reports that sciences were developed very much, but there was little poetry, few discourses on morality, or few humanistic works and art works (164-65). Langer's belief that the human mind should tend toward art is apparent. Perhaps she is right, or history now remembers Egypt for some of its more material accomplishments, which naturally would survive the deteriorating forces of time more. And, too, she may be thinking of the other, more clearly imbalanced civilizations that she discusses in the chapter. Both the Incas and the Aztecs had imbalanced civilizations. Concerning their mythology, their stories about the gods and the position of

Myth Has a Biological Basis

319

their culture in the cosmos, was very primitive while the technical and the political skills were very far advanced. Both built advanced cities while nonetheless engaging in barbaric practices such as human sacrifices (Mind III, 181-189). In both cases, the technical, practical aspects of their cultures had developed quite rapidly, far outstripping the development of more humanistic cultural activities. Another reason for the imbalance was the isolation of the Incas, permitting some tendencies of the culture to go unchecked, unbalanced by other cultures.

THE BALANCE IN EACH CULTURE According to Langer, human culture as a whole should "keep a certain balance between its highest and lowest degrees of change. A leading achievement can only lead by entraining the countless psychical activities that make up a mental life and an individual's or society's Weltanschauung [worldview]" (196). Here is a new function of a generative idea, that concept introduced more than twenty years before in Philosophy in a New Key: to change all other ideas besides itself until a balance is regained in a new level of culture. In the preceding discussion one meaning of "balance" is the adjustment of a person to his/her biological condition and individuation (personal development) through culture. Following this definition one type of imbalance would be the case in which success threatens the health of a person. In the following discussion and again in the discussion on modern myth the balance in a culture means an appropriate amount of importance given to various activities, to art and science, for example. MATHEMATICS, THE REIGN OF SCIENCE, AND THE OPEN AMBIENT OF MODERN CULTURE Although part of the plan of Mind was to generalize the principles of art to include science, there are few pages on science at the end of the three volumes; of course, ill health is one reason. "Mathematics and the Reign of Science" occupies an ambiguous position in the sequence of Volume III because, on the one hand, they belong within the section called "The Breaking," in which civilization is founded, and on the other hand they are treated as if they constitute a whole new era beyond all the five qualitative shifts that have gone before. Langer does write that the shift to modern science is as momentous as the very origin of language that initiated all of human culture (Mind III, 204).

320

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The biological basis for modern science is the specialization of the brain, interestingly enough into a part of the brain different from that used for speech (Mind III, 213). This division of cultural activities calls to mind the imbalance in the Egyptian culture, the high development of techniques in contrast to the low development of the humanities and the arts; and the high technological development of the Aztecs and the Incas in contrast to their low mythological levels. One conclusion to be drawn from this difference in the rates of development of different aspects of a culture is that a culture is not homogenous and closed. Not all of its principles are derivable from a single background or activity; rather, there are different activities within a culture which constitute islands of meaning, related to the others but with some degree of self-containment (208). These islands of meaning, which form our ambient world, are open in the sense that there is no single type of cultural activity which completely controls all the others. This conclusion about mind is coherent with her concession about the conclusion of the project Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. It lacks

a metaphysics and a set of epsitemological principles that would serve to explain the meaning of all the others, like a single background to which they all would refer. Nevertheless, she does give an account of the biological basis of mind, explaining the transition from animal life to human culture in much more detail than others have done. It is noteworthy that most of the levels of human culture correspond in general with what Cassirer called the mythical consciousness, though Langer tends to limit myth more to the level when stories explain human nature in relation to the cosmos. NOTES Cited in Umberto Eco's Semiotics, 184. See Schultz's Genetic Codes of Culture?, "Prologue," 8. 2 The Norton Reader: An Anthology of Expository Prose, Ed. Arthur M. Eastman. W.W. Norton & Company, N.Y., 1969, 1294-95. Also see page 4 ff. of Genetic Codes of Culture? 3 "Esthetic and Technical Metaphors," Journal of Philosophy, American Philosophical Association, 39(1942), 678. 4 The Nature of Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1952. "The Superorganic" (originally 1917) is in pages 22-51 and "So-called Social Science" (1936) is in pages 66-78. Also see The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. 8, "Kroeber, Alfred L." 460. 1

CHAPTER 14

The Global Society Needs Myth Its Solutions to Problems of Modern Life "In modern society . . . every person finds his Holy of Holies where he may: in Scientific Truth, Evolution, the State, Democracy, Kultur, or some metaphysical word like "the All" or "the Spiritual." Human life in our age is so changed and diversified that people cannot share a few, historic, 'charged' symbols that have about the same wealth of meaning for everybody. This loss of old universal symbols endangers our safe unconscious orientation. The new forms of our new order have not yet acquired that rich, confused, historic accretion of meanings that makes many familiar things 'charged'symbolsto which we seem to respond instinctively" (PNK 288). THE REGRESSION TO PRIMITIVE MYTH Just as one of the main concerns of Cassirer when discussing myth in modern life was to analyze the resurgence of undesirable primitive myths in modern life, Langer is aware of the problem: "After centuries of science and progress . . . the pendulum swings the other way: the irrational forces of our animal nature must hold their Witches' Sabbath" (PNK 292). The myths she mentions concern the blind worship of power which remains as a feeling built into our language through idioms and which, even more striking, may become elements of new myths manufactured by governments for propaganda (Mind III, 76). They bring to mind the violent social forces of Nazism, fascism, anti-semitism, and terrorism in the world today. Concerning Nazism and antisemitism, Cassirer offers more ideas. Occasionally, Langer refers to the primitive regressions in the behavior of Hitler who, like the ancient practice of branding, burning, or cutting the human body with a social symbol, or perhaps like the modern commercial practice of burning a symbol into cattle to show ownership, had the swastika tattooed on his bodyguards 321

322

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

{Mind III, 128). In the current process of increasing globalization of economies Langer does say that some feelings of primitive tribal unity may lead to international wars with results much more disastrous than the sporadic limited fighting on the lower level of culture ("Why Philosophy? 56). On a smaller scale, the same desire for the sense of human community may regress to a desire for a primitive tribal feeling in the form of nationalism (PNK 292). Though she did not mention it, it seems also to apply to hooliganism at sports events. According to Langer, modern society cannot but help inheriting some myths from the past, yet the ones that are inherited can be improved so as to play a positive role consistent with other cultural developments (Mind III, 4). A danger of ancient myths is that they are pre-ethical and so may lead to disastrous results; they are in a sense rationally "blind." Still, primitive myths left humanity with a lasting contribution in the collective memory, many of which function in the subjective experience of people today (PS 20). Sometimes they become changed so much that their primitive origins are obscured (Mind III, 22). Imagery, symbolism, and myths can acquire meanings on new levels. Myths can remain especially on the lower or least developed levels of society, levels that tend to repeat the past more than lead the way to new ideas (Mind III, 113). The sociologist Jacques Ellul explained how traditional myths helped tribal societies maintain some continuity of personal life during the too rapid transition of modernization (The Technological Society). Eventually, though, the old myths disappear; they cannot have their old power in the new society. The regression to primitive feeling can occur in times of trouble, according to Cassirer's interpretation of the Nazi nightmare and Langer agrees. Going one step further, Langer claims this regression shows a need for some type of myth ("De Profundis," 453). Then people know that they need something to believe in, they correctly choose myth, but they choose an inappropriate form of it (primitive myth). Langer mentions the odd appeal of cult religions in modern society (PNK 292). The social psychologist Rollo May, among others, also gives a similar explanation (The Cry for Myth). THE LACK OF MYTHS IN MODERN LIFE Much more than the potentially dangerous regression to primitive myth, Langer discusses the lack of myths appropriate for modern life. The edifice of modern civilization seems to make it difficult to have the needed myths:

The Global Society Needs Myth

323

In modern civilization there are two great threats to mental security: the new mode of living, which has made the old nature-symbols alien to our minds, and the new mode of working, which makes personal activity meaningless, inacceptable to the hungry imagination. Most men never see the goods they produce, but stand by a traveling belt and turn a million identical passing screws or close a million identical passing wrappers in a succession of hours, days, years. This sort of activity is too poor, too empty, for even the most ingenious mind to invest it with symbolic content. Work is no longer a sphere of ritual; and so the nearest and surest source of mental satisfaction has dried up. At the same time, the displacement of the permanent homestead by the modern rented tenemen—now here, now there—has cut another anchor-line of the human mind. Most people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a definite memory of one place to serve that purpose. Many no longer know the language that was once their mothertongue. All old symbols are gone, and thousands of average lives offer no new materials to a creative imagination. This, rather than physical want, is the starvation that threatens the modern worker, the tyranny of the machine. The withdrawal of all natural means for expressing the unity of personal life is a major cause of the distraction, irreligion, and unrest that mark the proletariat of all countries. Technical progress is putting man's freedom of mind in jeopardy (PNK 291-292). In Joseph Campbell: An Introduction, by Robert Segal, the world is said to be demythologized, and social problems such as crime result (Revised Edition 176). Langer states why the modern world becomes demythologized. Furthermore, she implies what needs any remythologization should fill and these are to be discussed in the following pages. THE IMBALANCE IN MODERN, GLOBAL SOCIETY The lack of appropriate myth in modern society can result because of a fundamental imbalance unprecedented in previous cultures. In fact, a new type of culture may be dawning. In Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling human evolution leads up to the fifth qualitative shift called civilization, which has lasted for at least 3,000 years, but Langer suggests that this phase may be ending and a new one starting: We may be at the very bottom of a new ladder of mental and moral ascent, in a human world stunned by civilization, and in a moment of

324

Cassirer and Langer on Myth pause in its otherworldly concerns, meeting the challenge of its own technical and economic constitution of a world-wide civilized society (Mind III 154).

Here she indicates the change in human culture to be the advent of the global society. At first the term global economy came into being until it became apparent that the internationalization is developing into a body of international law, regulation, and even common culture, including entertainment, food, and clothes. In Part VI of Mind, the new subject "Mathematics and the Reign of Science" is discussed very little in proportion to the previous chapters, mostly on myth, but the position of this material suggests that the new, sixth qualitative shift in human culture, which we are probably now entering, is one dominated by science, as the words "Reign of Science" would indicate. In the passage just quoted in which the global society is being constituted technically and economically, the force of change would be science and technology. In modern society Langer believes there is an imbalance due to the extremely rapid development of science and technology (218-219). Moreover, this development has gone unchecked because of the power of science and the unlimited global field for its dominance. Previously, cultural developments were usually limited by other cultures or by the immediate relationship to the sources of survival, that is, the environment. But now something unprecedented has occurred. Society has become so large and is becoming global with the result that the relationship of many people to the basic physical resources of survival is quite indirect while the life style also is quite mediated through human creations—it is more dominated by human products rather than things of nature. The result, claims Langer, is a dissociation from our biological natures, from our nature as a living organism, from our important sensory experiences (218-219). In the long passage quoted above, the common worker is felt to be deprived in many ways of the conditions of unity for personal experience. On a level more than the personal, Langer claims nations have not developed human sympathy enough in response to the ancient instinct of empathy with others of the same species, as the empathy in animal communication through smells and movements (Mind III, 141). Similarly, imbalance in the rate of development occurs in biological evolution (Mind III,83). "Great ages of myth-making are followed by eras of rationalistic labor," writes Langer about the situation of modern society as being in an

The Global Society Needs Myth

325

era of rationalistic labor (The Practice of Philosophy 193). In this idea the course of human culture is cyclic, from myth to reason and back to myth, supposedly myth of an improved type. To say that myth may become more rational may be a contradiction in terms, for its prerogative is just the feeling stratum of experience. There is a need to restore "the balance between the mind's individuation and the earthbound hold of its roots in animal nature, the enormous potential of mental life and its tiny allowance of time for realization" (Mind III, 148). Careers have come to be more important than the personal, biological relationships with parents, family, places, and even the things in our environment, which may be all artificial, constantly changing or being changed for new ones, or are not the objects of much attention because time does not permit. THE SOCIAL CAUSES OF THE LACK OF MYTH (DEMYTHOLOGIZATION) According to Langer and so many other writers, the causes of many modern problems in life are grouped under the rubric "technology." She does, however, have some praise for some of its achievements (PNK 23). Technology, propelled so fast by science, has advanced far ahead of the development of myth, art, and humanistic thinking, as it did in Langer's account of the Aztec culture, which built a vast city-kingdom in one-hundred years (Mind III, 178-79). If the rate of development is not the main problem, then the dominance of technical-practical thinking over the humanistic can be. The Incas, Mayans, and Toltecs all advanced their material developments without corresponding developments in the level or religion, art, or philosophy (193). The Egyptians, too, are thought to have lagged behind in the same activities. The same imbalance can occur in biological evolution when a hereditary trait becomes dominant and begins to make other traits rare, or an organ becomes overdeveloped so as to put in jeopardy the organism's adaptation to the environment. Globalization causes the loss of the mythology of nations—and almost instantly in some cases. The role of myths to provide a sense of continuity with the past, community with one's people, customs of behavior, and common ideals for the future is undercut. The World Society may be too general to provide a specific enough sense for people who are still so different, so far from each other ("Symbols and Emblems" 338). One problem I might add is that in the past the modernization occurred

326

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

through the action of one country, with its own mythology, but now the globalization results from the influence of several countries at once on the underdeveloped ones. The country to be modernized does not have a single new mythology to substitute for its old one in a process which would be personally and socially unsettling even if it did. Myths, rituals, and basic life symbols have been eliminated during the change to the modern life style. The conditions of work and the living environment have been mentioned. Langer mentions several others: The marriage pattern of lifelong partnership is breaking up, divorce being quite generally countenanced. What becomes of our time-honored social unit, the family? If that disintegrates, what can be put in its stead? Probably nothing; you can substitute one element for another only where the same place is to befilled,but with a radical change in the social structure of all mankind, the place for a fundamental social unit is not likey to be the same ("Why Philosophy?" 56). The passage suggests that myth helps to give humanity a matrix of the meaning of particular things, what Langer here calls a "place." Langer's generative ideas, which change other concepts in a new era, provide a new mythological beginning, a matrix of meaning. As another social cause for demythologization, modern life is becoming secularized: "the great trauma that Western civilization has of necessity inflicted" (FF 201). Langer means that it was necessary because of the nature of Western civilization, not because it could not have been otherwise or because it could not be otherwise now. She seems to be suggesting that the process of Western civilization is to some extent one of constant demythologization and remythologization in a new—possible more "secular"—way due to the advance of science. Along with the end of myths there is the end of the primary source of religious feeling. Myth contains a religious drive toward more abstract spiritualization, while religion remains bound to its mythical material images: "All mythology requires the notion of a 'Beyond' " (The Practice of Philosophy 191). Her idea of secularization, in the context of these ideas, is quite broad, meaning not only the reduction in formal religious practice but also the tendency to eliminate mystery from life, the elimination of the very special—sacred—status of many actions in life so that they become ordinary or little respect is held for them, or even the loss of the sense that the struggle of daily life is for some higher purpose even if only in a

The Global Society Needs Myth

32 7

general sense of a project guiding one's life. The daily events in life becomes dissociated from one another insofar as they lose their relationship to lifelong goals or ideals. This interpretation of Langer's idea of secularization is based on the views of several sociologists, such as Philip Slater and Jacques Ellul. They describe the ways in which science and technology help to eliminate the sense of the mysterious in life, especially in nature, by explaining some mysteries, which is good, but at the same time by giving us the sense that there is nothing out of the ordinary or that we need not think of any such thing because science and technology will explain it very soon. Rituals have lost their significance; marriage is a contract, a piece of paper, a mere convention and a temporary one at that. Worst of all is the loss of life symbols and myths helping to give a sense of the overall meaning of life. Religion used to—and for some people still does—provide them. For others, myths of financial success attempt to fill the human need. OTHER PROBLEMS CAUSED BY THE LACK OF MYTH There have been problems on the level of nations becoming unstable or beginning to engage in conflict with others and within their own borders (218-219). In an article written in 1950 she thinks there were thirty-five years of "political upheaval" ('The Deepening Mind" 119). There is a problem of faith in the very general sense of what one is living for, doubts of the "meaning of life" (PNK 289). "The blind faith in science has ended in disillusion and no faith at all," writes Langer ("The Deepening Mind" 119). The cause for this loss of morale is the imbalanced importance of science and technology at the expense of myth, art, and humanistic activities. As Langer's view shows, people need myth but were denied it by science and technology; then people tried to find a fulfilling mythology through science and technology but it turned out to be unfulfilling; and this failure may show that myth is different from science and both have their own prerogatives. There often is a lack of a sense of a general meaning to life. Few rituals remind people of a greater importance giving daily life its meaning (PNK 287). In modern terms ritual gives morale to the tribe while reminding its members of the importance of their actions by relating those to the universe as a whole. Rituals contain symbols charged with emotional meaning that give value to the activities they are related to. In

328

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

modern life the life symbols are all but gone and any remaining have lost their charge of emotion. Psychologically, there is a diminution of personal identity with a loss of passion for life, a casual attitude toward the most important matters, such as politics, and a sense of indifference toward human and cultural values (PNK 290). Sometimes there seems to be no unity to personal life, which myths would make (PNK 292). In addition, working conditions, and living conditions cause a "moral collapse" ("The Deepening Mind" 119). For instance, the rise of drug abuse on such a scale is a new phenomenon. SOCIAL PROBLEMS OF THE DECLINE IN MYTH AND ART The minimalized influence of myth and religion causes a general secularization of culture in Langer's view. Without a basis in myth and religion, art has become a matter for the academics, the elite, museums, or the rich collector rather than being something that people would see naturally and constantly in churches or palaces or universities or public places (FF 403). Then any positive healing effects on the culture would be reduced. The secularization in the culture, a result of the decline in myth and religion, creates attitudes unfavorable to the improvement of the culture; indifference, casualness, and a taste for whatever is popular or entertaining. "The vulgarization of art is the surest symptom of ethnic decline," and another symptom of cultural languor is the current lack of growth in the arts (PS 84). An interest in religion or an active myth-making or symbol making would provide material for art to transform by its symbolic processes (PS 84). Even though Langer's views on the relation of myth to art are not simple, formalized ones, it is clear that myth initiates new ideas in a culture and that art can use them as its material ("De Profundis" 453). When there is little myth or religion in art, when its material is not new but comes from the common sense environment of conventional knowledge, it becomes literal and self-imitating, a stagnation preventing art from remaking society (FF 403). The "art" that is produced tends to be "corrupt" in the sense of producing "a shallow sentimentalism" as so much television does and so many films do. Though Langer does not state her objection to popular art in these terms, other thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse describe popular culture as being reduced to one common level of understanding, to the level most people are already on, so that it loses its character of presenting something

The Global Society Needs Myth

329

people have not as yet experienced but would benefit from if they would try to understand its meaning (One Dimensional Man). Traditionally as one function of myth, it could provide people with something fascinating to raise the level of their understanding. SOLUTIONS BY THE POWER OF MYTH THAT REMAINS Despite the minimalization of myth, some individuals still have been able to know what they need and have been able to create the conditions for themselves; they have some ritual, life symbols, humanistic activities, personal life, and a "mental anchorage" in a family, neighborhood, or awareness of their bodies and nature (PNK 288-89). These individuals, definitely in the minority according to Langer, might serve as a model to others or the mythical elements in their lives may begin to change others. An interest in modern metaphysical myth must be inculcated: even in modern society the average person has a deep need of asserting the nature of his [her] world, in order that he [she] may constantly realize and confirm his own being. The content of such assertions is, of course, no longer individual in the framework of a great religion" (Mind III, 22). Some of the themes of myth continued beyond the primitive level are the origins of the world, the meaning of death, and the nature of a human being (Mind III, 25). Myths themselves may suggest to people their need for them. They restore "the balance between mind and the powers of nature" (Mind III, 133). Since, according to Langer, modern culture may be imbalanced due to the rapid growth of technology, it is only a question of time before the growth slows down, society realizes the imbalance, and those myths promoting the right kind of new balance are immediately recognized as rapidly as the original imbalance occurred. Afterall, myth initiates new ideas in a culture; then, the change would have to involve the myths themselves ("De Profundis" 453). It is a credit to Langer that she does not necessarily advise modern society to wait for its problems to be solved by the self-correcting forces present in social form generally. In "Symbols and Emblems for a United World" in a journal called Common Cause Langer attempts to provide the world with a symbol for the new global society: it is a design of a

330

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

circle with a spiral within it. Her reasons for attempting the project are that the emotional attitude of being a member of a world community cannot continue without a perceptible symbolism to fix the feeling, record it, transmit it, keep it stable, and keep it fairly common for all to refer to and become united by. She also mentions other means of creating a world symbolism and ritual (flags, ceremonies, etc.). I might raise the doubt whether a consciously designed symbol could ever have the force of a mythical symbol which arises from the collective unconscious of the community and so it is public, and in a sense already in force because its expression coincides with its transfer from the collective unconscious to the collective conscious symbolism. A similarly doomed project seems to be the consciously designed universal language Esperanto, which has not caught on yet because it did not arise as languages do and then is not in some sense a living language or "alive and efficacious" in the sense a real, nonartificial language is. In contrast, the manufacturing of myths in the form of propaganda may have occurred in Nazi Germany, as Cassirer writes about; however, even in this case the myths had a long-standing tradition in Germany and the Nazi leaders kindled the passions still extant below the surface of public discourses and raised them again in a new way. SOLUTIONS BY PHILOSOPHY AND MYTH Philosophers can help to solve problems of modern life, Langer believes. They can offer a "general interpretation of experience" ("End of an Epoch" 772). This sounds quite a lot like the metaphysical myths, which are needed, except that Langer probably means the philosophers would reflect on myths, not make them. Their general interpretation could bring the imbalance of society, the demythologization, to light as a first step in changing the situation. She believes the philosopher need not be active directly, need not engage in political actions. "A strong contemplative bent has kept me from entering directly into practical affairs, political, economic or social" [The Saturday Evening Post, May 13, 1961, and Current Biography

1963, page 235]. This issue was an important one in Cassirer's Myth of the State, which concluded that the philosopher must help society understand the dangers of its domination by bad myths and this is a kind of first action toward making the situation better. Publishing a book is a political act proper to intellectuals, or governments in several countries would not have attempted to censor publications.

The Global Society Needs Myth

331

Perhaps basing her ideas on Cassirer's, Langer does not discuss the specific problem of dangerous political myths very much but chooses to broaden the scope of the discussion to include an entire program of social reform, beginning with philosophy. First of all, intensive philosophical work is needed, especially work for a new science of society, one that would treat those aspects of society seemingly underdeveloped in the great wave of technological progress beginning with the Industrial Revolution. Not only would philosophy discuss those areas of society but also it would encourage research in the social sciences, in ethnology, psychology, and others to make up for their comparative underdevelopment in relation to the "hard" sciences like mathematics and physics ("Why Philosophy?" 56). Philsophy in combination with the other disciplines might be able to raise some public interest in new humanistic activities. Educational reform would change the curriculum by deemphasizing problem solving in the sciences in favor of understanding the more general significance of the developments, including the reason for the development of new ideas in the first place, the process of discovering them, and their value outside their own fields. In addition, there should be at least an equal emphasis on studies in the social sciences. Without this basis in the broad framework of society, without the highest concepts of philosophy having versions on various levels in society, Langer does not believe the program to balance the culture could acquire the sufficient support for an overall change. Philosophy can also analyze the vast symbols in modern culture that still lack discursive content: Race, Unity, Manifest Destiny, Humanity, and others (PNK 293). While these have been provided by myth, their further development within the culture requires other activities besides myth. Among them religion or art could rework the symbols to help their meaning to grow in new ways, as philosophy could help the symbols to become more rationally complete and intelligible. As mythical symbols they can carry a great emotional force, one helping to unite some groups of people; however, they lack the rational articulation through clear language and logical argument to make them ethical for large, multicultural societies. SOLUTIONS BY ART AND MYTH Just as philosophy can reinterpret the symbols of myth and religion, so too can art in its own way. Most of all, argues Langer, "the function of art is to objectify feeling

332

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

so that we can contemplate and understand it. It is the formulation of socalled 'inward experience', the 'inner life', that is impossible to achieve by discursive thought, because its forms are incommensurable with the forms of language and all its derivatives (e.g. mathematics, symbolic logic) (PS 90). It is not every author of a famous book on symbolic logic that would claim something cannot be formulated in its terms. Art does something that the sciences cannot—not psychology nor sociology nor any other. Indeed art does something beyond the work of myth. They can work together until art must perform its distinctive operations on the mythical symbols. If myth is the first means of having new feelings, modes of perception, and concepts, then art would de-existentialize the new content, formalize it, and present those formal aspects of the feeling that have aesthetic significance, relations formalized from the senses. In this interpretation of Langer's view, art does not make the new feeling, it just gives it a new, perhaps more explicit, developed expression. I believe Langer also means that art creates new feelings, since she clearly states on many occasions and in many ways that "art educates feeling" (FF 401). This education is an "illuminating contact with symbols of feeling." Part of this education is the role of artists to "preform " experience in the imagination before any of the actual experiences occur, which they do, sometimes generations later (FF 401). In a different way, art creates feelings when it gets the themes from the inner attitude of the artist and the collective unconscious before it has become symbolized and is on its way to becoming explicit self-knowledge. It is then art that adds these meanings to the themes of life under discussion. If art can change the feelings of nonartists, then it can be a force of social change, whether this is direct or not. On these issues Langer's ideas are similar to those of Joseph Campbell. As in Segal's discussion, Campbell believes artistic rendering of technology will be the source of new myths (Revised Edition 177). It follows from Langer's view that, ironic as it is, art coming from technological myths could create new feelings against them. Her view entails a self-corrective tendency in the cooperation of cultural activities: myth, art, and technology, each performing different functions nevertheless related in the whole society. If art cannot preserve physical life, as technology sometimes does, it has the equally important task of keeping the quality humanly acceptable (FF 402). It can preserve the spiritual life. Art in this role resembles other humanistic activities in culture. Religion, an example given by Langer,

The Global Society Needs Myth

333

helps people accept the end of life, gives meaning to it, and gives them moral guidance, perhaps courage (FF 402). In relation to myth, art seems to have the power of correcting society more; myth, the power of renewing it. In the modern situation myth can also correct society by restoring the balance of a person, the appropriated balance between individual achievement, probably measured by technological criteria of success, and personal feeling, on the level of what she calls "animal nature," namely, basic desires, satisfactions, and relationships. It is noteworthy that Langer seldom writes of the issues of pleasure or beauty usually discussed in aesthetics. True enough, these issues would lead the present discussion away from its proper subject, myth. The obvious emphasis shows art to be a kind of knowledge. Then its principles could apply to myth more directly than if it were discussed in another way. CONCLUSION ABOUT LANGER'S IDEAS ON MYTH IN MODERN LIFE AND THEIR RELATION TO HER THEORY OF MYTH Many of the ideas on modern life were written before the completion of her theory of myth in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, though the end

of this work does add to those ideas. Most can be found in Philosophical Sketches (1962), Philosophy in a New Key (1942), and a few other essays cited previously. This dissemination of her ideas suggests that she never intended to write a philosophy of modern life. Instead, from the beginning of her reflections on myth, their importance to modern life became clear. A theory of myth is incomplete without some reference to contemporary society. All theorists assume certain values that their theories have for their own societies and they condition the resulting theories. Obviously, Cassirer and Langer are concerned with understanding how a worldview is made, what the unity of culture is, and what role myth plays, then and now. Langer's philosophical desire to understand the contemporary worldview conditioned her theory of myth in the following ways. She is led to form ideas on myth that she might otherwise have not. For example, does myth remain throughout human culture? She answers, it can in a changed form and sometimes as a partial regression. This question and answer are important if one aims to form a comprehensice theory, as

334

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Langer does. Secondly, how does myth then function in modern society? She answers, myth can work in cooperation with other cultural activities, it providing the new feelings along with their symbols and other cultural activities reinterpreting them in valuable ways that myth cannot. In conclusion, Langer's ideas on myth in modern life complete her theory by fulfilling the aim of a comprehensive theory of knowledge, coming under the rubric "a theory of mind." Furthermore, they may even help to change the mind of which they speak and thereby improve society.

CHAPTER 15

Judging the Two Theories Their Influence and Places in History

About Cassirer: "Symbolic of his whole nature, therefore, was the way of his passing: on the street he was met by one of his students, who addressed a question to him. Cassirer turned to answer, smiled kindly at the young man, and suddenly fell dead into his arms" (Dimitry Gawronsky, "Ernst Cassirer: His Life and Work," 37). By Langer: "But even in its curtailed form, I hope my little concluding essay to end an Essay [Mind] may serve what I consider the true purpose of the whole book: to suggest some ideas which other people may be able to use for their own work, anywhere and everywhere in the great domain of philosophical thought. Whatever may be wrong with it, all the dross that needs elimination notwithstanding, my fondest wish for it is that what is true or new in it may eventuate in a parade of projects for young thinkers with long ways to go" (Mind III, 201). THE INFLUENCE ON SUBSEQUENT RESEARCH The parts of this epigraph have a common message. Both Cassirer and Langer would choose to have their philosophies judged by their influence rather than by their specific content, no matter how true; this influence would be the ability to spark new ideas unanticipated in their own. According to this standard the best philosophy would be one that served to lead to the creation of a different, new one. Cassirer's philosophy has done this. There is evidence that it determined the structure of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. 1

335

336

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

However, the French philosopher develops the critque of Cassirer's philosophy in the direction of a theory of perception, not a theory of myth. As a result, it will not be discussed here. This change in themes may suggest that the philosophy of myth leads to a philosophy of perception, and this idea is supported by Langer in her volumes on the biological basis of mind. If Cassirer's philosophy does inspire a new one and it in turn inspires a new one, the original philosophy enters a chain of philosophies through which it acquires lasting significance as a foundation. With the influence on Langer's work set aside for the moment, Cassirer's philosophy has been valuable in the work of many other philosophers, although only on the scale of particular ideas, not on the scale of a complete theory of knowledge and reality. The five-hundred-page bibliography on Cassirer's work and reactions to it by Wlater Eggers and Sigrid Mayer (Garland Publishing, 1988) can provide many examples. Now, ten years later, the number of references to Cassirer's work has increased. Many of the references would only be of interest to specialists and many would not be on the theory of myth. Nevertheless, many references are to works in fields other than philosophy, a fact showing the wide range of influence his work has, and year after year the scope of his influence is growing, as it generally does in the case of the most lasting contributions. This matter of influence outside the field of philosophy is discussed by Ivan Strenski in Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century

History:

Cassirer, Eliade,

Lévi-

Strauss and Malinowski (1987) and by Robert Segal in his book review of it.2 The question concerning Cassirer is the following: does his theory of myth come from the theoretical requirements of philosophy alone, or is the theory determined in a large measure by studies outside philosophy? Segal uses the word "solipsism" to describe the possible reliance on only the concepts and methods of one's field. Certainly Cassirer refers to many other types of research on myth, but are they used only as illustrations of ideas developed on the basis of a philosophical project? Cassirer's answer has been that those empirical studies influence his theory of myth on a whole to whole basis; it is not a question of an individual empirical observation being the confirmation of a universal concept such as the category of space in myth. In the idealistic spirit of Cassirer and Langer, the observation of "facts" depends more on general modes of thinking than these modes depend upon facts for their confirmation.3 By far, the greatest influence of Cassirer's theory of myth is on the theory of myth by Langer, and as much as she wrote on myth, still her work on art far exceeds it and her aesthetics is what she is known for. In

Judging the Two Theories

337

many passages throughout her lifetime Langer refers to new ideas by Cassirer that lead her to develop the implications of his work—how much she does this, how far her new ideas go, is the main scholarly question asked of her work. In general, scholars tend to think of Cassirer whenever Langer is mentioned, and her greatest influence may be to refer readers to his work or to be a disseminator of it. The limited influence is expressed by semioticist Thomas A. Sebeok in "From Vico to Cassirer to Langer": After World War II, because of the easy accessibility of her attractive paperback, Philosophy in a New Key, Langer became something of a campus celebrity, but her work, while never regarded as trivial, seldom seems to have been taken for more than "a point of departure" by such professionals as Morris (166). Sebeok goes on to say that Langer's influence on American semiotics is "equivocal" because her views are accepted by only a faction and yet they "merit detailed reconsideration" because of the range of topics in symbolism, especially new topics such as art. One telling example is that of Work on Myth by Hans Blumenberg. He criticizes Cassirer's explanation of the beginning of myth as a symbolic form in such a way that it repeats Langer's own attempt at improving it; however, there is no discussion of Langer's work in his 700-page attempt at comprehending the field of myth studies, or even any reference to it. Her name is not in the index. Blumenberg attempts to explain Cassirer's idea of animal symbolicum, which Cassirer takes as a starting point, as a solution to problems of the biological organism in adapting to its environment, much as Langer seeks the biological basis of myth.4 Besides Langer, other professional philosophers have continued Cassirer's seminal work on myth, albeit not on such a scale. In "Cassirer's Concept of Symbolic Form" Verene discusses the issue of Cassirer's influence. There has been influence on the original thinker Paul Ricoeur, though on a theory of metaphor, not on a theory of myth. Verene rightly points out some problems limiting Cassirer's influence: he was expatriated from Nazi Germany so that it became harder for a body of students to build up his reputation by forming a school or movement; also, his work appears to be a vast compilation of scholarly researches rather than a philosophical system in the traditional sense with a set of technical metaphysical terms. To some extent, Langer's philosophy is judged to be similarly unoriginal. The influence of Cassirer is sure to grow, starting in his native

338

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Germany with a new wave of his publications. John Michael Krois is leading other scholars in research on Cassirer's philosophy. He edited the posthumous writings on Cassirer which are coming out in several volumes, the most important of which is a fourth volume of Cassirer's main work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Krois has written about Cassirer's idea of myth in articles and a monograph, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. Work by other German scholars specifically on myth includes "Politische Mythen als Kulturphänomene nach Ernst Cassirer" by Enno Rudolph and "Mythos und Moderne in der Kulturphilosophie Ernst Cassirers" by Heinz Paetzold, both published in CassirerForschungen, Band 1, Felix Meiner Verlag, Hamburg, 1995. In addition to the publishing of Cassirer's posthumous works, Krois is extending Cassirer's ideas on myth insofar as it is related to technology in "Ernst Cassirer's Theory of Technology and Its Import for Social Philosophy." Two other scholars have written articles and books extending Cassirer's ideas on myth. David Lovekin has begun with the ideas on myth and used them to help create a philosophy of technology, based on Cassirer's suggestion that technology could be understood as a symbolic form. He is especially interested in the use of myths by the technological society and has developed Cassirer's ideas along with those of the sociologist Jacques Ellul. A similar interest in Cassirer's ideas on myth has developed into a development of them in the work of Donald Philip Verene. While he and Lovekin agree on the basic interpretation of Cassirer's ideas (Lovekin being a former student of Verene), he does not develop them with the goal of a social philosophy. Verene extends them into a more general theory of the imagination inspired by reexamining a main source of Cassirer's philosophy of myth, the thought of Giambattista Vico. In this way Verene helped to increase the scholarly interest in Vico's thought. As Verene writes, Cassirer missed the essential aspect of symbol and culture that are present in Vico's thought. Cassirer's interest in the articulate symbol further prevents him from a grasp of the role of the negative and radical oppositions as present in the process of culture.. .. Cassirer fails to take up the poetic or mythic sense of the symbol. He has no philosophy of the imagination ("Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture" 144). By and large, Verene's interpretations of Cassirer's theory of myth are sympathetic, the constructive criticism centering on Cassirer's "intellectualist view of the mythic imagination" (Ibid.).

Judging the Two Theories

339

THE PLACES OF CASSIRER AND LANGER IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY It is perhaps premature to form a final judgment; still, history is beginning to form it. Are their contributions lasting or are they confined to this period of history? In Cassirer's case, the praise is sometimes so high that it would indicate his lasting importance: "Cassirer had all the marks of a great thinker in a new philosophical period" (Schilpp 382). "I would not like to be a man of whom posterity will say that he rejected Cassirer" (Dilthey, as reported by Gawronsky, in The Library of Living Philosophers, 17).

"As it often happens in the history of thought, the problem presented itself suddenly to a number of people in different fields of scholarship. The outstanding answer to it was given by Ernst Cassirer, in his great work, Die Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen" (FF 236).

"the greatest living German philosopher," said the biologist Jakob von Uexkull (See Sebeok, "From Vico to Cassirer to Langer," 165). Assessments about Langer's work are also quite glowing, though there is the tendency to regard her as a follower. Is her Philosophy in a New Key really Philosophy in Cassirer's Key? Several points of similarity, difference, and derivation of Langer's views from Cassirer's have been mentioned in previous chapters. THE DIFFERENCE IN CASSIRER'S AND LANGER'S IDEAS OF PHILOSOPHY Much light can be shed on the issue of the originality of Langer's work and perhaps its judgment by the future as well as that of Cassirer's work if the models of philosophy they put into practice are compared. At many times and in several different statements Langer denies that she is doing metaphysics (FF vii-viii; Mind I, xvii; Mind III, 201). In the case of each new major work, Langer denies that it is metaphysics. There are a few passages in which metaphysics is spoken of in a positive light as the general interpretation of experience ("The End of an Epoch" 772). But this was earlier than her main works. At the end of her career, with ill-health forcing her to curtail the theory of mind, she regrets not adding a more theoretical set of new epistemological principles at the end, or a

340

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

new metaphysics (201). Of course, if she adds it at the end, then it is not known at the beginning of her career, or at least is not formed along the way, as an integral part of the specific discussions. If metaphysics is added as an after-thought, then the ideas before it are not metaphysics. In the case of Cassirer's theory of myth, distinctively philosophical concepts are a part of the discussion at each new main stage: concepts such as the categories of space, time, and others; the concept of symbolic form; the concept of the three universal functions of mind, the one arising from myth being called "expression"; and the ideal limit toward which myth and all other cultural activities tend. When Langer formally states definitions of philosophy, they are often conventional ones, such as the clarification of common confusions in language, or reflection on the presuppositions of science (Mind I, xxii; "Why Philosophy?"; and the Prefaces to most works). This limited conventional definition may suggest that she does not have a radically new one, or that she does not try to work one out, or that she only defines philosophy in a conventional way so as to help gain approval for her other ideas. She refers to the definition of "metaphysical" at least once "in a slurring sense—insoluble problems whose very statement harbors a paradox" (PNK 9). According to this definition metaphysics would be something to avoid. Langer's new idea of a generative idea may ironically apply to herself: meaning not that she creates a new idea generating an era of discourse but that she is part of a new generative idea formulated by Cassirer, the idea of a symbolic form of myth and other activities of culture. Following in his wake she may continue his reforms in the theory of knowledge by extending them more to art than he did in his lifetime. Certainly, there is evidence for this interpretation.

THE PROBABLE JUDGMENT BY THE FUTURE The probable judgment by the future is that Cassirer changes the nature of philosophy; Langer does not. Their definitions of philosophy—which they put into practice—show a difference in the degree of change in thinking. In Cassirer's philosophy there can be said to be a greater revolution. In a special sense Cassirer's philosophy of myth embodies a new "myth" of philosophy, an idea requiring some explanation. In recent scholarship on his theory of myth, both Elizabeth M. Baeten and Christopher G. Flood describe Cassirer as being a mythmaker of sorts. Baeten does not criticize the fact that theories of myth

Judging the Two Theories

341

create in themselves some semblance of the myths they explain, just as myths mirror the world. She criticizes the conclusions one can draw from his theory, conclusions that constitute mythmaking on his part, and it is mythmaking in a bad sense (211). There are two conclusions: today humanity is mythless; and, secondly, humans must become divorced from the natural and the mundane order of daily life. The title of her book The Magic Mirror: Myth's Abiding Power comes from Cassirer's Myth of

the State in which he states that theorists from different fields tend to interpret myth as if the primitives are engaged in the same activity as the theorist: primitive philosophy or primitive science, and so on. It is surprising that, if Cassirer should introduce the idea of this pitfall, that he would be guilty of it; still it is possible. I think this objection is more a statement of Baeten's ideas than Cassirer's. It is true that modern science is at the furthest remove from immediate perceptual experience on Cassirer's view, though it is clearly explained that it is only a limited activity within life and does not constitute a total orientation to life as myth does, with its distinctive type of perception, action, and cultural creations in all areas of life. Secondly, Cassirer does not actually claim that the modern world is mythless; in fact, he states that it has manufactured evil myths, though he also claims the abilities first developed through primitive myths are present in a limited and changed way in the structuring of personal experience today—even the personal experience of the scientist, especially when "off duty." Concerning the presence of myth in modern life, Cassirer does believe that it has a much more restricted role than it does in the life of primitives. If all cultural activities dvelop from an original common matrix of myth, then some of the original functions of myth are taken over and changed by nonmythical activites such as science. There are some functions still considered to be the prerogative of myth, but Cassirer writes little about them, because his sole aim is not a theory of myth. In Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction Flood criticizes Cassirer for claiming that political myth is evil. Actually, Cassirer does not claim that all political myth is evil, or that it is essentially evil; it just happens to be that almost all his discussion is concentrated on the dramatic regression to primitive myth in Nazi Germany. Cassirer leaves open the possibility that myth can serve the state and its citizens positively. According to Flood, Cassirer has created a myth through his theory of political myth, and it is present in the narrative of history developing from primitive to civilized, from myth to reason. It would follow that myth would be something to overcome, not something positive in modern

342

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

political life. Perhaps, Flood interprets Cassirer's attitude negatively due partially to the many negative views toward myth. For example, Flood seems to interpret Cassirer along the lines of Bidney's statement: "Myth must be taken seriously as a cultural force but it must be taken seriously precisely in order that it may be gradually superseded in the interests of the advancement of truth and the growth of human intelligence" ("Myth, Symbol, Truth" 392). Cassirer's Myth of the State could lead even some good readers to Flood's conclusions; Cassirer's corpus would not. Though I disagree with the specific content of Flood's objection, I believe he considers Cassirer's theory well enough to see the importance in it of an overall narrative structure to the discourse. In contemporary theories of types of discourse it has become common accepted that science and so "knowledge proper" does not use a narrative structure in its discourse; it should use a supposedly synchronic structure of hierarchically arranged concepts, the one concluded from the other. This discussion occurs in The Postmodern Condition by JeanFran_choic Lyotard. Assuming the introduction of a nonsystematic element into theory by the use of narrative, Flood is critical of Cassirer's theory insofar as the narrative produces mythical constructs such as "a special form of consciousness" (275). These words are best explained by the words in the context: "There is no need to posit a special form of consciousness or to situate the process of mythmaking within a psychopathology of the irrational. There is nothing strange about mythmaking. There is nothing wrong with it. It is an entirely normal way of making political events intelligible in the light of ideological beliefs" (275). Perhaps there is no need for Flood to posit a form of consciousness, since he is not an idealistic philosopher. Cassirer has different goals from those of Flood. Flood attempts to explain myths as empirical phenomena. Cassirer attempts to construct a theory of knowledge with a universal scope including the past, the present, and the future. Therefore, the symbolic form called myth in his philosophy is analogous to a formula in a scientific theory. Both can have a possible application to empirical phenomena, though which phenomena is not specified in the formula itself. The purpose of the formula is not to classify phenomena. The origination of the formula and its definition come more from other formulas and assumptions and so on than from empirical observation. A universally valid formula could never be proven by in-

Judging the Two Theories

343

duction from any number of actual cases. In the same way, Cassirer uses the subject matter of myth studies to fill in the outlines of his general ideas and to guide him toward the development of other general ideas. Cassirer came to the idea of a symbolic form before he studied myth and used myth as the first symbolic form to help give flesh and bones to his universal ideas. Cassirer did not deduce the idea of a symbolic form from empirical myth studies as Flood suggests. Flood's view fails to distinguish sufficiently between two senses of myth: the sense in which Cassirer's theory would be a myth and the sense in which the narratives he discusses are myths. In the following discussion, I suggest how his theory might be called mythical in relation to the subject he studies, which is mythical in a different sense. THE MYTH OF THE MAN AND "THE MYTH" OF HIS PHILOSOPHY Very early in Cassirer's academic life a myth started to be built up around him. Arriving at the university in Marburg in 1896, Cassirer soon acquired a reputation for having the most knowledge in all subjects, including mathematics, physics, philosophy, and other subjects, and he was nicknamed "the Olympian" for his lofty intelligence (Gawronsky, The Library of Living Philosophers, 9). According to Dimitry Gawronsky, the vast knowledge can be attributed to his encyclopedic and photographic memory: Undoubtedly the credit for Cassirer's stupendous knowledge must be attributed to a large degree to his exceptional memory. Cohen told us several times that as a young student Cassirer was able to quote by heart whole pages of almost all the classical poets and philosophers. And, in a sorrowful voice, Cohen never forgot to add: "Even all modern poets, like Nietzsche and Stefan George, he could quote you by heart for hours!" This prodigious memory served Cassirer faithfully to the end of his days and made him capable of finding with the greatest of ease any quotations he needed in all those countless books he had read during his life time. Yet Cassirer's memory was not just a passive capacity, a sort of storage for acquired knowledge—it was rather an erinnern in Goethe's sense, a process of repeated and creative mental absorption, combined with a keen ability to see all essential elements of a problem and its organic relation to other problems. Cassirer's sharp and most active intellect constantly used the rich material of his

344

Cassirer and Langer on Myth memory, incessantly reviewing and reshaping it under different aspects, thus keeping it vividly present in his mind (9).

Other events served to raise his stature above the ordinary. His maltreatment as a Jewish professor in Germany, leading to his expatriation, makes him seem like a hero-figure. The Nazi propaganda master Herr Goebbels himself signed a newspaper article against Cassirer for a joke he had told about the evils of the desire for the possession of territory.4 The meeting with the already famous yet strange Martin Heidegger in Davos in 1929 also helped to give him a special status as one of the thinkers of the age. In many ways, his life fits the pattern of a culture hero. Rank felt that the hero must be born into royalty; Cassirer was born into a wealthy family (JC 10). Rank believes the hero kills his father; symbolically, Cassirer criticized the main philosophical influence before him, Georg Hegel. In Joseph Campbell's theory of myth, the hero completes a threepart journey: separation, initiation, and return {Hero 30). In the beginning, there is a separation from the past; Campbell believes the hero—in Segal's words—"is willing to leave the security and comfort of society for an unknown world" (JC 9). Cassirer did this in two ways: he left Germany in very uncertain circumstances, not being able to take all of his children at once and not having a place to relocate to; secondly, in his philosophy he leaves the secure ideas of the past and declares very new ones. In the middle stage, one of initiation, the hero encounters "fabulous forces" and "a decisive victory is won" (30). In Cassirer's philosophy he solves the big problem of the unity of myth and the other forms through the concept of a set of universal functions in each of the forms. In the third step of Campbell's theory, "the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man." With the concept of the ideal limit of all cultural activities, Cassirer finds the ideal to which they are all tending and this completion of the basic structure of his theory of myth and his whole philosophy allows him later to attempt to apply this theoretical framework to modern political myths, thereby "bestowing boons on his fellow men [and women]." The last part of his life was spent as a respected, established philosopher in America. With a position at a major university, his work has authority and he shared this with a new audience. In the Preface to the third volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Cassirer stated that he would like to add a critical conclusion that had a reference to "present day philosophy as a whole"—like Gilgamesh returning to his people with a story of wisdom.

Judging the Two Theories

345

In the posthumously published fourth volume Cassirer discusses different philosophies of life. In a general way, the main concepts by which Cassirer's whole philosophy is structured, including his theory of myth, follow the three-part pattern. The three main turning points in his philosophy of myth are the following: first of all, the concept of symbolic form (in which the worldmaking ability of myth is explained); secondly, the concept of a universal function of human consciousness (in which the abiding power of myth is explained); thirdly, the concept of an ideal limit for all cultural activities (in which the recurrence of myth at higher levels is explained). These three concepts have been defined in the context of his theory of myth in previous chapters. The last concept, the ideal limit, is thought to be a paradox by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception and also by Langer: "if there be such an ideal limit to our progressive understanding (and it may be doubted, for such a synoptic insight savors of an illegitimate totality'), it does not offer any measure of actual achievement" (FF 5-6). The cyclical nature of individual philosophies, like the cyclical nature of myths in the historical series of their development according to Campbell, ends in a problem insoluble within the assumptions of the original philosophy, like the Gordian knot, which could not be untied and had to be cut. Both Cassirer and Langer believe the traditional end of a philosophy is such a problem that prompts a new beginning (PSF I, 74; The Practice of Philosophy 173). Historically speaking, philosophy developed out of Greek myths, according to the views of Cassirer and Langer. It seems that the threepart structure of myths in Campbell's well defined view has some relevance to Cassirer's philosophy, though it is much more rationally determined of course. This pattern does not characterize Langer's philosophy, which she admits is lacking in metaphysical concepts. That some modern philosophies might still retain the developmental pattern of myth in a general way can be supported by recent ideas in genetics. In the study of bees from DNA samples taken from amber that was 10,000 years old, it was found that some chromosomes do lead to change, especially superficial ones, but the total genetic code underlying the total organism remains remarkably the same during the course of tens of thousands of years. It might also be the case that the terminology and some themes of philosophy differ much from those of the ancient cosmologies, though the structure at the deepest level does not differ as much as is commonly believed. The cyclical nature of myths seems to be

346

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

repeated in the best of philosophies forming a chain in the long Western tradition. At any rate, the conclusion about the cyclical development of modern philosophies is the view of both Cassirer and Langer. Whether or not the general pattern of the development of concepts within a philosophy still resembles that pattern in the most universal myths of the past, still some similarity can be seen in the questions. In support of this line of thinking is Langer's idea of "metaphysical myth," discussed previously. A similarity in the questions might suggest a similarity in the functions in life as a whole. Myths first raised questions and provided answers to the most important problem of the meaning of human life, and today philosophy tries to do the same. The subject of myth helps Cassirer, Langer, and other philosophers to think about the goals of their own thought; however, they have them before they begin to study myth. In this sense, the philosophy of myth is determined by the "myth" of philosophy, including the goals a thinker has before considering the topic of myth. NOTES 1

See "The Unity of Culture in Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy," an unpublished Ph.D. thesis by William Schultz, and these ideas were clarified in a paper delivered to the American Philosophical Association in Boston, December, 1981, entitled "The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and His Vision of It." In The Phenomenology

of Perception Merleau-

Ponty criticizes Cassirer and builds an entire philosophy of perception from the critique. 2

See "Book Reviews," Ed. Hans A. Baer and Gordon Shepherd, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 537-38.

3

Langer writes, "Actually, the growth of conception, which is the aim of philosophy, has a direct bearing on our ability to observe facts" (FF 6).

4

See page x of the Translator's Introduction.

Selected Bibliography Cassirer's and Langer's Philosophies of Myth

The following bibliography attempts to list the works of Cassirer and Langer that develop their theories of myth, as well as scholarly interpretations of them, and a few other works on myth which have a relevance up to about 1998. The attempt has been to provide as many as possible for an introduction, though considering the vast number of possible writings there may be a few omissions. The bibliography was preceded by fuller ones not specifically on their theories of myth. The major bibliography on Cassirer is by Walter Eggers and Sigrid Mayer: Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated Bibliography, New York, Garland Publishing, 1988, 483 pages. The major one consulted on Langer is "Susanne K. Langer. Primär-und Sekundärbibliographie," by Rolf Lachmann, in Studia Culturologica, vol. 2, 1993, pp. 91-114. The difference in the size of the bibliographies may be an indication of the difference in the influence of the two philosophers. The manuscripts of Cassirer which were unpublished during his lifetime are held in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, though the Yale University Press owns all but one manuscript. Some papers were subsequently published in Symbol, Myth, and Culture, edited by Verene, and others are currently being published in English by Yale University Press and edited by Verene and in German with Felix Meiner Verlag under the direction of John Michael Krois and others. As Verene reports in Symbol, Myth, and Culture, Cassirer's personal library was purchased by the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Chicago, Illinois, in 1966, some of which are still held in the rare book section of the Circle Campus library. 347

348

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The manuscripts of Langer which were unpublished at her death are held in The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. In "MS Storage 199" the "Suzanne Langer Papers" comprise 47 cartons, none of the labels for which explicitly name myth, although some of the cartons with notes on her books, some others containing lectures, or some containing letters may have ideas about myth not contained in her main works and published essays. Her private library is in the Susanne K. Langer Collection, Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College, 270 Mohegan Avenue, New London, Connecticut 06320-4196. There is currently a revival of interest in Cassirer as evidenced by the foundation of a society called Internationale Ernst CassirerGesellschaft (in care of Dr. E. Rudolph, FEST, Schmeilweg 5, D-69118, Heidelberg) and a large-scale effort to publish his main unpublished works in the U.S. (including major new translations of a fourth volume of Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen and his major work on the history of philosophy Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neuren Zeit and Germany (especially Die Nachgelassene Manuskripte und Texte). I have no knowledge of a society devoted to Langer. There is a mailing list on the Internet for the Philosophy of Myth. See Philosophy in Cyberspace: A Guide to Philosophy-Related Resources on the Internet (Ed. Dey Alexander, Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green, Ohio, p. 98). The List name is myth. Moderator, List Owner / Administrator is Kent Palmer ([email protected]), SUBSCRIPTION ADDRESS IS [email protected]. "This list is for the discussion of the philosophy of myth and the myth of philosophy. It is a Thinknet BBS and DialogNet philosophy list." CASSIRER'S BOOKS Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken. (Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, Vol. I.) Leipzig & Berlin: Teubner, 1922. Repr. in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolgriffs. Determinism

and Indeterminism

in Modem Physics: Historical and

Systematic

Studies of the Problem of Causality. Trans. by O. Theodor Benfey. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956. Das Erkenntnisproblem

in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit. 3

volumes. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1906, 1907, and 1920 for the 3 volumes respectively. Reprinted by Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974.

Selected Bibliography

349

An Essay on Man: An Introduction

to a Philosophy

of Human Culture. New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1944. Freiheit und Form. Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte.

Berlin: Bruno Cas-

sirer, 1916. Repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961. Die Geschichte der Antiken Philosophie

(The History of Ancient Philosophie;

256 pages). Written by Ernst Cassirer and Ernst Hoffman. Part I of Lehrbuch der Philosophic

Die Geschichte der Philosophic

Edited by Max

Dessoir. Berlin: Verlag Ullstein, 1925. This describes the change from mythical to logical thinking in ancient Greek philosophy; especially refer to the introduction: "Die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie als die Geschichte des Sichselbst-Findens des Logos" (The History of Greek Philosophy as the History of the Self-finding of the Logos"). Also see Myth of the State for the relationship between myth and philosophy, both ancient and modern. Goethe und die geschichtliche Welt. Drei Aufsätze. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1932. Idee und Gestalt. Fünf Aufsätze. Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1921. Repr. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1971. The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy. Trans. by Mario Domandi. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1963. This omits appendices to the German edition. Kant's Life and Thought. Trans. by James Haden. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Language and Myth. (The original has a German subtitle which means "A Lecture on the Problem of the Names of Gods") Trans. by Susanne K. Langer. N.Y.: Dover, 1953. The Logic of the Humanities. Trans. by Clarence Smith Howe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. The Metaphysics

of Symbolic Forms (Posthumous Vol. 4 of The Philosophy

of

Symbolic Forms, which was not previously available, even in the German). See The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms below. The Myth of the State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946. Nachgelassene

Manuskripte

und Texte (Posthumous writings and texts). Edited

by John Michael Krois, O. Schwemmer, M. Ferrari, E. Rudolph, H. Wismann, and others. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995. 20 volumes. Volume I is a posthumous collection made from notes constituting a fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Zur Metaphysik der symbolischen Formen. Concerning myth, especially see Volume 5: "Zur Kulturphilosophie und zum Problem des Ausdrucks"; Volume 7: "Zu Mythos, Sprache und Kunst"; and Volume 9: "Lectures on Greek Philosophy" (in English).

350

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

The Philosophy of the Enlightenment.

Trans, by Fritz C.A. Koelin and James P.

Pettegrove. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951. Die Philosophie Philosophie,

der Griechen von den Anfängen

bis Platon. {Lehrbuch der

ed. Max Dessoir, Vol. I: Die Geschichte

der

Philosophie.)

Berlin: Ullstein, 1925. The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms I: Language. Vol. II: Mythical Thought. and Vol. III: The Phenomenology

of Knowledge. Trans. by Ralph Manheim.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955. The German original of Vol. I was published in 1923, Vol. II in 1925, and Vol. III in 1929. In 1995 Felix Meiner Verlag published what constitutes a posthumous fourth volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic

Forms: Zur Metaphysic

which is the first volume of Nachgelassene

der symbolischen Manuskripte

Formen,

und Texte. Yale

University Press will have translations forthcoming of most of Cassirer's previously untranslated works, beginning in 1996. Zur Metaphysic der symbolischen Formen is translated by John Michael Krois and edited by him and Donald Phillip Verene as The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume 4: The Metaphysics

of Symbolic Forms with an Essay on Basis

Phenomena,

1996. The Platonic Renaissance in England. Trans. J.P. Pettegrove. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1953. The Problem of Knowledge:

Philosophy,

Science, and History since

Hegel.

Trans. from the German manuscript (1940) by William H. Woglom and Charles W. Hendel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950. The Question of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Trans. by Peter Gay. New York: Columbia University Press, 1954. Rousseau—kant—Goethe:

Two Essays. Trans. by James Gutmann, Paul Oskar

Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr., with a preface by Cassirer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945. Symbol, Myth, and Culture: Essays and Lectures of Ernst Cassirer,

1935-1945.

Ed. Donald Phillip Verene. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927-1933. Ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois, with Josef M. Werle. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985. Substance and Function & Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (Two monographs bound as one.) Trans. by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Collins Swabey. N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1923. Symbol, Technik, Sprache: Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1927-1933. Ed. Ernst Wolfgang Orth and John Michael Krois, with Josef M. Werle. Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1985. Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs. Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1956.

Selected Bibliography

351

CASSIRER'S ARTICLES AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS "Albert Schweitzer as Critic of Nineteenth-Century Ethics." The Schweitzer

Albert

Jubilee Book, ed. A.A. Roback (Cambridge, Mass.: Sci-Art,

1946), 239-58. "Der Begriff der symbolischen Form im Aufbau der Geisteswissenschaften." Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg, I, (1921-22; Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1923), 1 1 - 3 9 . Repr. in Wesen und Wirkung des Symbolbegriffs,

169-200.

"A Cassirer-Heidegger Seminar," trans. Carl Hamburg, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXV (1964), 208-222. "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, V (1944), 1-35. "Form und Technik." «MDUL»Kunst

und Technik, ed. Leo Kestenberg (Berlin:

Volks verband der Bücherfreunde, Wegweiserverlag, 1930), 15-61. "Einleitung. Die Geschichte der griechischen Philosophie als die Geschichte des Sichselbst-Findens des Logos" See the entry Die Geschichte der Antiken Philosophie. "The Influence of Language Upon the Development of Scientific Thought," The Journal of Philosophy, XXXIX (1942), 309-327. "Judaism and the Modern Political Myths." Contemporary

Jewish Record, 7

(1944), 115-26. In Symbol, Myth, and Culture, ed. Verene, 233-41. "Logos, Dike, Kosmos in der Entwicklung der griechischen Philosophie." Göteborgs Högskolas Arsskrift, 47 (Göteborg: Eleanders Boktr., 1941). "The Myth of the State." Fortune, 39 (1944), 164-67, 198, 201, 202, 204, 206. "Philosophy and Politics." (Lecture at Connecticut College, April 3, 1944) In Symbol, Myth, and Culture, ed. Verene, 219-32. "Mythic, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space," Trans. by Donald Phillip Verene and Lerke Holzwarter Forster, Man and World, 2(1969), 3-17. "Zur 'Philosophie der Mythologie.'" «MDUL»Festschrift für Paul Natorp zum 70. Beburtstage. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1924. "The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy," Trans. by John Michael Krois, Man and World, 11 (1978), 411-28. "Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie." Zeitschrift für Aesthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft,

21(1927), 295-322.

"Reflections on the Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception." In Symbol, Myth, and Culture, ed. Verene, 271-91. "'Spirit' and 'Life' in Contemporary Philosophy," trans. Robert Walter Bretall and Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Vol. VI of The Library of Living Philosophers, Tudor.

pp. 857-880. Second printing: New York:

352

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

"The Technique of Our Modern Political Myths." (A Lecture delivered at Princeton University, January 18, 1945.) In Symbol, Myth, and Culture, ed. Verene, 242-67.

BOOKS ON CASSIRER Baeten, Elizabeth M. The Magic Mirror: Myth's Abiding Power. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Ballard, Edward G. Art and Analysis: An Essay Toward a Theory in Aesthetics. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957. This book groups Cassirer with Langer as having an essentially symbolist orientation, though Langer "supplements" his view of art. Also, Nelson Goodman in Languages of Art groups Cassirer with Langer for their theories of the symbol. Barnes, Mahlon, Jr. "Concept Structure in Cassirer and Whitehead." (Ph.D., Northwestern University, 1961). Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Trans. from the German by Robert M. Wallace. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1985. The first two parts contain discussions of Cassirer's views. Braun, Hans-Jürg; Holzhey, Helmut; and Ernst Wolfgang Orth. Über Ernst sirers

Philosophie

der

symbolischen

Formen.

Frankfurt

am

CasMain:

Suhrkamp, 1988. Most relevant to the study of myth are these essays: "Cassirers Kritik des mythischen Bewusstseins," by Helmut Holzhey, "Mircea Eliades Interpretation des Mythos im Blickfeld der Philosophie ischen Formen,"

der symbol-

by Hans-Jürg Braun, and "Vernunft aus Geschichte. Ernst

Cassirers systematischer Beitrag zu einer Philosophie der Politik ," by Volker Gerhardt. "Cassirer, Ernst." Twentieth-Century

Authors: First Supplement.

Ed. Stanley J.

Kunitz. N.Y.: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1955. Pp. 179-80. Cassirer, Toni. Mein Leben mit Ernst Cassirer. (My Life with Ernst Cassirer). Hildesheim: Gerstenberg, 1981. Originally written in 1948. Clouser, Karl Danner. "Ernst Cassirer's Concept of Myth as a Symbolic Form." (Ph.D., Harvard University, 1960-61). Cook, Albert. Myth and Language.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1980. From Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated Bibliography,

"Makes the point

that in relating myth and language as communicative symbolic forms Cassirer 'defuses the mythic or emotional side' in 'intellectual explanation'." Cosens, Grayson V. "The Nature and Function of Myth in the Philosophies of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne Langer, and H.B. Alexander." (PH.D., Univ. of Southern California, 1957).

Selected Bibliography

353

Feldman, Seymour. "Ernst Cassirer's Theory of the Concept." (Ph.D., Columbia University, 1963). Ferretti, Silvia. Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Gaona, Francisco. Das Raumproblem

in Cassirers Philosophie der

Mythologie.

(Inaugural-Dissertation, Eberhard-Karls-Universität, Tübingen, 1964. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. London: Fontana Press (HarperCollins Publishers), 1973. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976. Hamburg, Carl H. Symbol and Reality: Studies in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. 1970. Itzkoff, Seymour W. Ernst Cassirer: Philosopher

of Culture. Boston: Twayne,

1977. Kirk, G.S. Myth: Its Meaning and Functions

in Ancient and Other

Cultures.

Sather Classical Lectures. Vol. 40. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Klibansky, R. and H.J. Paton, eds. Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936; 2nd edition, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1963. Krois, John Michael. "Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and the Problem of Value." (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University, 1975). --------.

Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1987. Lavin, Albert L., and others. Some Meanings and Uses of Myth (Study Group Paper No. 6). N.Y.: Modern Language Association of America, 1966. Lenz, Frederick Walter. "Erinnerungen an Ernst Cassirer" (Memories of Ernst Cassirer). Monatshefte für Deutschen

Unterricht, Deutsche Sprache

und

Literatur 40(1948), 401-05. Levi, Albert William. Literature, Philosophy and the Imagination.

Bloomington:

Indiana University Press, 1962. Cassirer explains how the imagination works, especially when discussing myth. Liszka, James Jakob. The Semiotic of Myth: A Critical Study of the Symbol. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. Lovekin, David B. Ernst Cassirer's Theory of Man and Symbol (M.A., Northern Illinois University, 1970). Marmier, Claire. "La pensée mythique chez Ernst Cassirer et ses postulats esthétiques," (Ph.D., University of Paris, 1949). May, Rollo. The Cry for Myth. N.Y.: Delta (Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group), 1991.

354

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology

of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith.

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962. ---------. The Structure of Behaviour. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963. Meyer, Franz Elieser. Ernst Cassirer (In German). (Deutsch-jüdisches Gespräch, ed. H. Loebel.) Hannover: Niedersächsische Landeszentrale für Politische Bildung, 1969. Moehle, Natalia R. From Myth to Philosophy: Philosophical Implications of The Mythic Understanding

of Transtemporal Identity. N.Y.: University Press of

America. 1987. Noack, Hermann. Index: Philosophie

der symbolischen

Formen. Berlin: Bruno

Cassirer, 1931. The index includes topics, persons, and literature. Petale-amato, John. "Ernst Cassirer's Theory of Culture." (Ph.D., Fordham University, 1974). Rudolph, Enno, and Bernd-Olaf Küppers, eds. Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. 1995. This recent work part of a rival of interest in Cassirer's works contains essays on myth and politics. Schilpp, Paul Arthur, ed. The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. Vol. VI of The Library of Living Philosophers Series. Evanston, Illinois: The Library of Living Philosophers, Inc., 1949. Also published by Open Court Publishing, April 1977. Schrems, John Joseph. "The Political Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer: A Study in Modern Liberal Political Thought." (PH.D., The Catholic University of America, 1965). Schultz, William Roger. Genetic Codes of Culture? The Deconstruction

of Tradi-

tion by Kuhn, Bloom, and Derrida. N.Y.: Garland Publishing, 1994. -----------. "The Unity of Culture in Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy." (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University, 1980). Segal, Robert. Explaining

and Interpreting

Religion:

Essays on the

Issue.

Toronto Studies in Religion. N.Y.: Peter Lang, 1992. Strenski, Ivan. Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-century Eliade, Levi-Strauss and Malinowski.

History:

Cassirer,

Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,

1987. Sundaram, K. Cassirer's Conception of Causality. Series V of American Universities Studies. Vol. 28. N.Y.: Peter Lang. 1987. Verene, Donald Phillip. Ernst Cassirer's

Theory of Myth. (M.A., Washington

University, 1962). ------------. "An Examination of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms." (Ph.D., Washington University, 1964).

Selected

Bibliography

355

----------. Man and Culture: A Philosophical

Anthology. N.Y.: Laurel, Dell Pub-

lishing, 1970. -----------. The New Art of Autobiography:

An Essay on the 'Life of Giambattista

Vico Written by Himself '. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. -------------. Sexual

Love and Western

Morality:

A Philosophical

Anthology.

Boston:

Jones and Bartlett Publishers, 1995. Wheelwright, Philip. Metaphor and Reality. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962. From p. 428 of Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated

Bibliography,

"Credits Cassirer with the 'most eminent' work in twentieth-century philosophy elevating the importance of the subject of language; criticizes Cassirer's definition of myth as 'synonymous with the mythopoeic mode of consciousness' and detached from 'particular, concrete narratives'." -------------.The Burning

Fountain:

A Study

of the Language

of Symbolism.

Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1968. From p. 428 of Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated Bibliography, "In a chapter called 'The Mythic Dimension,' follows closely Cassirer's theory that even primitive myth represents an activity of imaginative integration, making experience intelligible and drawing together the community of believers."

ON CASSIRER: ARTICLES AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS "Aesthetics, History of." The Encyclopedia

of Philosophy.

Ed. Paul Edwards.

Vol. I. N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing, 1967. See p. 32. Allers, Rudolf. "The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer." New Scholasticism,

25

(1951), 184-92. Allwohn, Adolf. "Schellings Philosophie der Mythologie in ihrer Bedeutung für das Mythosverständnis der Gegenwart" (in German). Zeitschrift philosophische

für

Forschung, 9(1955), 177-81.

Altmann, Alexander. "Symbol and Myth." Philosophy, 20(1945), 162-71. This compares Jung's view and Cassirer's, pointing out that for Jung myth tends to be more an unconscious phenomenon but not for Cassirer; and, Cassirer writes about progress beyond myth (see Eggers and Mayer, p. 431). Andolfato, Vittorio. "Il rapporto sensibile-intelligible nella consezione del simbolo di Ernst Cassirer" (in Italian). Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica,

57

(1956), 224-38. Anon. Encyclopaedia

Britannica, Macropaedia.

Vol. 15, Chicago: Helen Hem-

mingway Benton, 1973. Arlen, Michael J. "The Air." An article in The New Yorker, 31 March 1980, pp. 112-14. Verene writes on this article: ". . . . Arlen has understood better

356

Cassirer and Langer on Myth than any of the scholarly work on Cassirer's conception of the state its implications for a grasp of contemporary politics" ("Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture," p. 141, note 41)

Arnett, Willard E. "Ernst Cassirer and the Epistemological Values of Religion." Journal of Religion, 35(1955), 160-67. Bamberger, F. "Professor Ernst Cassirer 60 Jahre alt."

Zentralvereinzeitung

(Berlin), XIII, No. 32(August 9, 1934). Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. "On the Definition of the Symbol," in Psychology the Symbol: An Interdisciplinary

Symposium,

and

ed. Joseph R. Royce (N.Y.:

Random House, 1965), 26-72. He states that both Cassirer and Langer have a theory of the nondiscursive symbol, which would primarily mean myth and which would point to what other scholars think is not a similarity but a difference between Cassirer and Langer. Bidney, David. "Myth, Symbolism, and Truth." Journal of American

Folklore,

68(1955), 379-92. The "most significant attempt in modern times to construct a philosophy of myth as an integral part of a philosophy of culture." Blanshard, Brand. Review of An Essay on Man, by Ernst Cassirer.

Philosophical

Review, 54(1945), 508-511. Boboc, Al. "Ernst Cassirer und die semiotische Asthetik," Revue Roumaine

des

Sciences Sociales 17(1973), 157-63. Blumenberg, Hans. "Ernst Cassirers gedenkend bei Entgegennahme des Kuno Fischer-Prizes der Universität Heidelberg im Juli 1974," Revue

Interna-

tionale de Philosophie 28(1974), 456-463. Campbell, Harry M. "The Philosophy of E. Cassirer and Fictional Religion," The Thomist 33(1969), 737-754. Campbell, Joseph. "The Interpretation of Symbolic Forms." in The Binding

of

Prometheus; Perspectives on Myth and the Literary Process. Collected Papers of the Bucknell University Program on Myth and Literature and the Bucknell-Susquehanna Colloquium on Myth in Literature, March 21-22, 1974, ed. Marjorie W. McCune, Tucker S. Orbison, and Philip M. Withim (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 35-39. Though the title would indicate the subject is Cassirer's ideas, it is Campbell's ideas. Cole, James Lawrence. Review of The Philosophy Mythical

Thought,

of Symbolic Forms, Vol II,

by Ernst Cassirer. In The Philosophical

Review,

LXVI(1957), 251-255. Eggers, Walter and Sigrid Mayer. "Introduction," in Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated Bibliography

N.Y.: Garland Publishing, 1988.

Emmet, Dorothy. Review of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Vol. II, Mythical Thought, by Ernst Cassirer. In Mind LXVII(1958), 1 1 1 - 1 2 .

Selected Bibliography

357

Entrikin, J. Nicholas. "Geography's Spatial Perspective and the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer." Canadian Geographer, 21(1977), 209-22. Erickson, Stephen A. "Cassirer's Dialectic: A Critical Discussion."

Idealistic

Studies, 4(1974), 251-66. Ettelt, Wilhelm. "Der Mythos als symbolische Form. Zu Ernst Cassirers Mythosinterpretation." Philosophische

Perspektiven, 4(1972), 59-73.

Flitner, Wilhelm. "Rede auf Ernst Cassirer, gehalten am 16. Dezember 1954 auf einer Gedenkfeier in der Universität anlässlich seines 80. Geburtstages am 24. Juli 1954." Hamburger Universitätsreden,

19(1955), 6-12.

Frye, Northrop. "Myth as Information." Review of Philosophy

of

Symbolic

Forms, vol. 1. Hudson Review 7, 2(Summer 1954). Reprinted in Northrop Frye on Culture and Literature,

ed. Robert D. Denham (University of

Chicago Press, 1978). Gadol, Eugene T. "Der Begriff des Schöpferischen bei Vico, Kant und Cassirer, II," Wissenschaft und Weltbild 2(1969), 8-19. "German Philosophy and National Socialism." The Encyclopedia

of Philosophy.

Ed. Paul Edwards. Vol. 3. N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing, 1967. Page 315. No mention of Cassirer but there is mention of Heidegger who took the place of Cassirer, a Jew who resigned and would not support Nazism as Heidegger did. This is relevant to Myth of the State. Hendel, Charles W. "Ernst Cassirer, Man and Teacher." Philosophy and Phenomenological Research VI(1945), 156-59. -----------. General Introduction to The Philosophy

of Symbolic

Forms, Trans.

Ralph Manheim, Vol. I, pp. 1-65. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953. Holzhey, Helmut. "Cassirers Kritik des mythischen Bewusstseins." In Kates, Carol A. "Psychical Distance and Temporality" Tulane Studies in Philosophy 20(1971), 75-94. Keck, Timothy R. "The Marburg School and Ethical Socialism: Another Look," The Social Science Journal 14(1977), 105-19. Kockelmans, Joseph J. "On Myth and Its Relationship to Hermeneutics." Cultural Hermeneutics,

1(1973), 47-86. Cassirer regards myth as "a special

mode of understanding and/or living." Korner, S. "Ernst Cassirer," The Encyclopedia

of Philosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards.

Vol. II, Macmillan Publishing, 1967, 44-46. Krois, John Michael. "Der Begriff des Mythos bei Ernst Cassirer," in Philosophie und Mythos.

Ein Kolloquium,

ed. Hans Poser (Berlin: Walter de

Gruyter, 1979), 199-217. -------------. "Cassirer, Neo-Kantianism and Metaphysics." Revue de et de Morale,

4(1992), 437-453.

Métaphysique

358

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

- - - . "Cassirer's Unpublished Critique of Heidegger." Philosophy and Rhetoric, 116, 3(1983). - - - . "Ernst Cassirer's Contribution to a Conception of the Symbolic Function," in A Semiotic Landscape: Proceedings of the I st Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies: Milan, June, I974 (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 295-99. ---."Ernst Cassirer's Theory of Technology and Its Import for Social Philosophy." Research in Philosophy & Technology, 5( 1982), 209-22. - - - . "Peirce and Cassirer: The Philosophical Importance of a Theory of Signs." In Proceedings of the C.S. Peirce Bicentennial International Congress (Graduate Studies, no. 23), ed. K.L. Ketner, J.M. Ransdell, C. Eisele, M.H. Fisch, C.S. Hardwick (Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, 1981), 99-104. - - - . "The Problem of the Symbol and Its Place in the System of Philosophy," Man and World 11(1978), 411-28. - - - . Review of Andreas Graeser's Ernst Cassirer. Beck'sche Reihe: Denker. Mlinchen: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1994. - - - . Review of David R. Lipton's Dilemma of a Liberal intellectual in Germany, 19I4-I933. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978. In Journal of the History of Philosophy, XX, 2(April 1982), 209-213. - - - . "Urworte: Cassirer als Goethe-Interpret." Kulturkritik nach Ernst Cassirer. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1995,297-324. Langer, Susanne K. "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth," in The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, ed. Schilpp, 379-400. - - - . "De Profundis." Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 28 (1974), 449-55. Lovekin, David. "Jaques Ellul and the Logic of Technology." Man and World: An International Philosophical Review I 0( 1978), 251-272. Society for Philosophy and Technology. Group Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Chicago. Spring 1977. - - - . "Technology as the Sacred Order." Research in Philosophy and Technology 3(1980), 203-222. Liibbe, Hermann. "Cassirer und die Mythen des 20. Jahrhunderts." (Festvortrag anHisslich der Tagung "Symbolische Formen" gehalten am 20.10.1974 in Hamburg. Veroffentlichung der Joachim Jungius-Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften.) Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975. Miegge, Mario. "Una Traccia di Lavoro sui Problemi del Mito: Nel400 Anniversario di Neues Testament und Mythologie di Rudolf Bultmann." Protestantesimo, 36( 198 I), 199-219.

Selected Bibliography

359

Mol, Hans. "Belief: Its Contribution to Whole-Making." Religious

Traditions

(Brisbane, Australia), 2(1979), 6-23. Montagu, M.F. Ashley, "Cassirer on Mythological Thinking." The Philosophy

of

Ernst Cassirer, ed. Schilpp, 359-77. Morey, Maria Eugenia. "El tema del mito en la filosofia de Ernst Cassirer" (in Spanish: The Subject of Myth in the Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer). Philosophia, 27(1963), 29-42. Morgan, John Henry. "Religious Myth and Symbol: A Convergence of Philosophy and Anthropology." Philosophy Today, 18(1974), 68-84. Moser, Simon. "Mythos, Utopie, Ideologie." Zeitschrift

für

philosophische

Forschung, 12)1958), 423-36. From Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated

Bibliog-

raphy, "Cassirer's last book, The Myth of the State, no longer maintains, on its new level, the epistemological stringency of The Philosophy

of Symbolic

Forms. Are the modern political systems of totalitarianism perhaps mythsurrogates and ideologies?" Mullins, Willard A. "Truth and Ideology: Reflections on Mannheim's Paradox." History and Theory, 18(1979), 141-54. Mullins agrees with Cassirer that myth is not a mere mistake. "Myth." The Encyclopedia

of Philosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards. N.Y.: Macmillan

Publishing, 1967. Pp. 434 and 437. No mention of Cassirer or Langer but there is of Vico and the climate of discussion in which Cassirer and Langer wrote about myth. Nadeau, Robert. "Bibliographie des textes sur Ernst Cassirer." Revue tionale de philosophic

interna-

28(1974), 492-510. affrontement."

Dialogue

Pachter, Henry M. "The Intellectuals and the State of Weimar." Social

Research,

-------------."Cassirer et Heidegger:

Histoire d'un

(Canada), 12(1973), 660-69. 39(1972), 228-53. -------------. "On Being in Exile." Salmagundi,

10-11(1969-70), 12-51.

Paci, Enzo. "Vico and Cassirer." In Giambattista

Vico: An International

Sympo-

sium. Ed. G. Tagliacozzo and H.V. White. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 457-473. Panofsky, Erwin. "Die Perspektive als 'Symbolische Form'." Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 4(1924/25), 258-330. Pappe, H.O. "On Philosophical Anthropology." Australian Journal of Philosophy, 39(1961), 47-64. Poma, Andrea. "Il Mito nella Filosofia delle Forme Simboliche di Ernst Cassirer, I. I precenti della filosofia delle forme simboliche. II. La comprensione cassireriana di Kant." Filosofia, 31(April, 1980), 187-236.

360

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

-----------."Il Mito nella Filosofia delle Forme Simboliche di Ernst Cassirer: III. La filosofia delle forme simboliche: prima fase, IV. Seconda fase."

Filosofia,

31 (July 1980), 491-544. ------------. "Il Mito nella Filosofia delle Forme Simboliche di Ernst Cassirer, V. Il mito nel sistema delle forme simboliche, VI. Seconda Fase."

Filosofia,

31(October 1980), 669, 712. "Religious Language." The Encyclopedia

of Philosophy. Ed. Paul Edwards. Vol.

7. N.Y.: Macmillan Publishing, 1967. See p. 172. Ringer, Fritz K. Review of Lipton's Dilemma of a Liberal Intellectual. In Canadian Journal of History, 15(1980), 151-53. Schilpp, Paul Arthur. "Ernst Cassirer," International

of the Social

Encyclopedia

Sciences, Vol. 11, 1968, 331-333. Schmidbauer, Wolfgang.

und Psychologic" Studium

"Mythos

22(1969), 890-912. From Ernst Cassirer: An Annotated "Claims

that

seeing

in myth

an autonomous

Generale, Bibliography:

symbolic

form,

as

Cassirer does, may lead to its recognition but blocks all access to it, while seeing in it the socio-political ideology of former times (Graves), a useful collective illusion (Malinowski), or an instrument of the process of socialization and forming of conscience (Borkenau), opens a door to its understanding . . . " Schrems, John J. "Ernst Cassirer and Political Thought," Review of Politics 29(1967), 180-203. Schwarz, M. "The Realistic Conception of Myth in Schelling's Later Philosophy." lyyun, 10(1959), 192-216 (Hebrew); English summary, 230-28. Sebeok, Thomas A. "Ernst Cassirer, Jacques Maritain, and Susanne Langer." In Semiotics, 1989. Eds. John Deeley, Karen Haworth, Terry Prewitt. Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America. 1990. Pp. 389-97. --------------. "From Vico to Cassirer to Langer." In Giambattista American

Science,

Philosophy

and Writing.

Vico and

Anglo-

Ed. Marcel Danesi. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter. 1994. Pp. 159-170. Segal, Robert. Review of Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss

and Malinowski,

History:

by Ivan Strenski, (Iowa

City: University of Iowa Press, 1987). In "Book Reviews" in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 537-538. Silverstone, Roger. "Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lévi-Strauss: Two Approaches to the Study of Myth." Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions, 41(1976), 25-36. Simpson, Michael. "Paul Tillich: Symbolism and Objectivity." Heythrop

Jour-

nal, 8(1967), 293-309. He criticizes Cassirer for being a relativist and for his "inadequate critical idealism."

Selected Bibliography

361

Smith, John E. "Some Comments on Cassirer's Interpretation of Religion," Revue Internationale

de Philosophie 28(1974), 475-91.

Solmi, Renato. "Ernst Cassirer e il mito dello Stato." Il Pensiero

Critico,

1(1951), 163-74. Strenski, Ivan. "Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Thought in Wiemar Culture" History of European Ideas, 5(1988), 363-83. Thie, Marilyn C. "The 'Broken' World of Myth: An Analysis." New

Scholasti-

cism, 45(1971), 38-55. Tillich, Paul. "Schelling und die Anfänge des existentialistischen Protests." Zeitschrift für philosophische

Forschung, 9(1955), 197-208.

--------------. "The Religious Symbol." Myth and Symbol,

ed. F.W. Dillistone (Lon-

don: S.P.C.K., 1966), 15-34. Tlili, Mustapha. "Méchanceté d l'homme et tyrannie du prince. Essai sur la théorie machiavélienne du gouvernement." Revue de Métaphysique

et de

Morale, 73(1968), 205-22. Many references to The Myth of the State. Van Riet, Georges. "Mythe et vérite." Revue

Philosophique

de

Louvain,

58(1960), 15-87. From the Garland bibliography on Cassirer: "Divides research in myth and philosophy into two categories: the first judges myth in the name of philosophical truth, the second rethinks the notion of truth as a function of myth. Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms II belongs in the second category, and more specifically in the sub-group of phenomenological approaches. He is related to the authors following Lévy-Brühl, such as Gérard van der Leeuw, Maurice Leenhardt, and Mircea Eliade. But his method is distinct from theirs in some aspects. He distinguishes religion and myth as different structural forms, and, due to his neo-Kantian tendency, he does not revalorize myth to manifest its truth." Van Roo, William A. "Symbol According to Cassirer and Langer." Gregorianum, 53(1972), 487-534; 615-77. Verene, Donald Phillip. "Cassirer." Encyclopedic

Dictionary

of Semiotics.

Ed.

Thomas Sebeok. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 3 vol. 1986. ----------. "Cassirer's Concept of Symbolic Form and Human Creativity." Idealistic Studies, 8(1978), 14-32. ----------. "Cassirer's Philosophy of Culture." International

Philosophical

Quar-

terly, 22(1982), 133-144. ----------. "Cassirer's 'Symbolic Form'," in II Cannocchiale:

Rivista di Studi

Filosofici l-2(gennaio-agosto 1991), 289-305. ----------. "Cassirer's Political Philosophy," A paper originally for the Cassirer Research Project, Humboldt University, Berlin. In Cassirer Jahrbuch, Vol. 2. The bibliography cites early works (1916 onward), and works in German, French, and Italian on the political dimension in Cassirer's thought. Forthcoming.

362

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

----------. "Cassirer's View of Myth and Symbol." Monist, 50(1966), 553-64. ----------. "Ernst Cassirer: A Bibliography," Bulletin of Bibliography,

24(1964),

104-06. This is updated in "Ernst Cassirer, Critical Work 1964-1970," Bulletin of Bibliography,

29(1972), 21-22, 24. These and other bibliographies

by (1) Steven W. Esthimer, (2) Carl H. Hamburg and Walter M. Solmitz, (3) Raymond Klibansky and Walter Solmitz, and (4) Robert Nadeau have been superceded by the Eggers and Mayer bibliography published by Garland. ------------. "Introduction," in Symbol, Ernst

Cassirer,

1935-1945,

Myth,

and Culture:

Essays

and Lectures

of

1-45.

----------. "Introduction: What Is Culture?" Man and Culture: A Philosophical

An-

thology. N.Y.: Laurel, Dell Publishing. 1970. ---------. "Kant, Hegel, and Cassirer: The Origins of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms." Journal of the History of Ideas, 30(1969), 33-46. ----------. "Metaphysical Narration, Science, and Symboic Form." Review of Metaphysics, 47(September 1993): 115-132. ---------. "Mythic, Aesthetic and Theoretical Space," Trans. D.P. Verene and L.H. Foster. Man and World 2(1969). ------------. "The Philosophy of Culture and the Problem of Human Existence." Akten

des XIV Internationalen

Kongresses

für Philosophie

(Vienna, Sep-

tember 2-9, 1968), 4(1969), 497-502. ------------. " S c i e n c e , S y m b o l i c F o r m , a n d N a r r a t i o n . " A p a p e r d e l i v e r e d at t h e c o n -

ference "Narrative Patterns in Scientific Disciplines." The Cohn Institute, the Universities of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. April 1992. -------------. " T e c h n o l o g y a n d M y t h : A n H e g e l i a n V i e w of C o n t e m p o r a r y C u l t u r e . "

XVth World Congress of Philosophy, Bulgaria. (Sept. 1973). -----------. "Vico and Cassirer." Corsi e ricorsi, Institute for Vico Studies, New York. ------------. "Vico's Influence on Cassirer," New Vico Studies, 3(1985), 105-111. ----------. "Vico's Science of Imaginative Universals and the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms," in Giambattista

Vico 's Science of Humanity,

ed. Giorgio

Tagliacozzo and Verene (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 295-317. Vircillo, D. "La fenomenologia del linguaggio nel pensiero di E. Cassirer," Rivista Rosminiana di Filosofia e di Cultura 44(1970), 187-202. Wolf, Robert G. "Cassirer and the Philosophic Study of Myth."

American

Catholic Philosophical Association Proceedings, 45(1971), 1 0 4 - 1 3 . Wurmser, Leon. "A Defense of the Use of Metaphor in Analytic Theory Formation." Psychoanalytic

Quarterly, 46(1977), 466-98.

-----------. "Is Psychoanalysis a Separate Field of Symbolic Forms?" Humanities in Society, 4(1981), 263-94.

Selected Bibliography

363

LANGER'S BOOKS "A Logical Analysis of Meaning." (Ph.D., Radcliffe College, 1926). The Practice of Philosophy.

New York: Henry Holt & Co. With a "Prefatory

Note" by Alfred North Whitehead. 1930. An Introduction to Symbolic Logic. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Comp, 1937. Language and Myth, a translation from the German original by Ernst Cassirer. N.Y.: Harper & Brothers, 1946. A preface is included. Feeling and Form. A Theory of Art Developed from "Philosophy in a New Key." N.Y.: Charles Scribner"s Sons, 1953. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Vol. I. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1967. Vol. II in 1972. Vol. III. in 1982. There is an abridged edition by Gary Van Den Heuvel. Forward by Arthur C. Danto. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Philosophical Sketches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1962. Philosophy

in a New Key. A Study in the Symbolism

of Reason, Rite and Art.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942. Problems of Art. Ten Philosophical

Lectures. N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons,

1957. Reflections on Art. A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers. Ed. and Introd. by Langer. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958. Structure, Method and Meaning: Essays in Honor of Henry M. Sheffer, Eds. Susanne K. Langer, Paul Henle, Horace M. Kallen. N.Y.: Liberal Arts, 1951. Pages 171-182 contain Langer's 'Abstraction in Science and Abstraction in Art," reprinted in Problems of Art.

LANGER'S ARTICLES AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS 'Abstraction in Art," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 22(1963-64), 379-92. "The Appearance of Feeling in Art," Rhode Island School of Design. Alumni Bulletin, 20(June 1963), 24-29. "Art: The Symbol of Sentience," New World Writing, 4(1953), 46-55. "The Cultural Importance of the Arts," Aesthetic Form and Education. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958. Pp. 1-8. "The Deepening Mind. A Half-Century of American Philosophy," (Discussions with Eugene T Gadol), The American Quarterly, 2(1950), 118-32. "De Profundis," Revue Internationale

de Philosophie, 28(1974), 449-455.

"The Dynamic Image," Dance Observer 23(1956), 85-87. Reprinted in Problems of Art.

364

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

"End of an Epoch," in Atlantic Monthly 147(1931), 772-775. "Esthetic and Technical Metaphors as an Index to the Essential Unity of the Arts," The Journal of Philosophy, 39(1942), 677-78. "The Expression of Feeling in Dance," Dance. A Projection for the Future. Impulse. 1968. San Francisco: Impulse Publications, 1968, pages 15-21 and Discussion, 21-27. " 'Expressive Language' and the Expressive Function of Poetry," On Expressive Language. Worcester: Clark University Press, 1955, 3-9. "Facts: The Logical Perspectives of the World," The Journal of

Philosophy,

30(1933), 178-87. "The Great Shift: Instinct to Intuition," Man and Beast: Comparative Social Behavior. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971. Pp. 313-322. "The Growing Center," Frontiers of Knowledge.

N.Y.: Harper and Brothers,

1956. Pp. 257-86. "Henry M. Sheffer (1883-1964)," Philosophy and Phenomenological

Research,

25(1964-65), 305-307. "The Individual and Society," Education

in World Perspective. Ed. Emmet J.

Hughes. The International Conference on World Educational Problems. N.Y.: Harper & Row, 1962. Pp. 172-87. Introduction (ix-xviii). Reflections on Art: A Source Book of Writings by Artists, Critics, and Philosophers.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958.

"The Lord of Creation," Fortune Magazine, 30(January 1944), 127-54. "Make Your Own World," Fortune Magazine, 31(March 1945), 156-92. "Man and Animal. The City and the Hive," Antioch Review, 18(Fall (1958), 261-71. "On Cassirer's Theory of Language and Myth," The Philosophy

of Ernst Cas-

sirer. Ed. Paul A. Schilpp. N.Y.: Tudor, 1949. Pp. 381-400. "On the Relations between Philosophy and Education," Harvard

Educational

Review, 26(1956), 139-41. "The Origins of Speech and Its Communicative Function," The Quarterly

Jour-

nal of Speech, 46(1960), 121-34. "The Primary Illusions and the Great Orders of Art," The Hudson

Review,

3(1950), 219-233. "The Principles of Creation in Art," The Hudson Review, 2(1950), 515-534. "Reply to Henry Aiken's Criticism," Philosophy

and Phenomenological

Re-

search, 7(1946/47), 671-72. "Scientific Civilization and Cultural Crisis," Annals of the Japan Association Philosophy

of Science,

2(1962), 66-72. Published in

for

Philosophical

Sketches, pp. 95-107. "The Social Influence of Design," University (Princeton), 25(1965), 7-12.

Selected Bibliography

365

"Symbols and Emblems for a United World," Common Cause. A Journal of One World, 2(1949), 338-340. "To the Editors of The Journal of Philosophy,"

The Journal of

Philosophy,

27(1930), 586-588. "Translator's Preface," Language and Myth, by Ernst Cassirer. N.Y.: Dover Publications, 1953. Pp. vii-x. "What Are the Social Responsibilities of Scientists?," A radio discussion among Susanne K. Langer, Gordon Dean, D.W. Esbach and Karl Lark-Horovitz with moderating by James H. McBurney. In Northwestern Reviewing Stand, 16(4.3 1951), 3-9. "Why Philosophy?" Saturday Evening Post, May 13, 1961, 34-35. "World Law and World Reform," Antioch Review, 1 l(December 1951), 462-73.

BOOKS ON LANGER Ballard, Edward G. Art and Analysis: An Essay Toward a Theory in Aesthetics. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1957. Bennett, Curtis. God as Form. Albany: New York Press, 1976. Berube, Richard N. "Symbol, Art and Sacrament: the Art Symbol according to Susanne K. Langer and Its Analogy with Sacrament." (Ph.D., The Catholic University of America, 1982). Casey, John. The Language of Criticism. London: Methuen, 1966. Cochrane, J. Scott. "Toward a Satisfactory Approach to Religion and the Arts: Based upon Whitehead's Philosophy of Organism and Susanne K. Langer's Philosophy of Art." (Ph.D., Claremont Graduate School, 1986). Cosens, Grayson V. "The Nature and Function of Myth in the Philosophies of Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer, and H.B. Alexander." (Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1957). Dickie, George. Aesthetics: An Introduction. Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1971. Firth, Raymond. Symbols Public and Private. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973. Green, Lucile W. Ethics in the "New Key." Ann Arbor: University Microfilms, 1958. Hofstadter, Albert. Truth and Art. N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 1965. Johnson, James R. "The Primacy of Form: A Study of the Philosophical Development of Susanne K. Langer with Implications for Choral Music." (Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1988). Kidneigh, Barbara Jean. "The Potential Rhetorical Power of Myth: An Account Based on the Writings of Cassirer, Langer, and Burke." (Ph.D., University of Denver, 1990).

366

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Kösters, Barbara. Gefühl, Abstraktion, symbolische Transformation. Zu Susanne Langers Philosophie des Lebendigen. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993. Langer, William L. In and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Autobiography

of William

L. Langer. N.Y.: N. Watson Academic Publications, 1977. McKinneey, J.P. The Structure of Modern Thought. London: Chatto & Windus, 1971. "The Philosophy of Suzanne K. Langer: A Symposium." The 81stt Annual Meeting, The American Philosophical Association. Eastern Division. New York. Vol. 81. No. 11. December 1984. After correspondence with the main office of the APA I learned that this symposium was oral and the discussions were not published proceedings. The participants were Ruth Barcan Marcus (Chair), and speakers Arthur C. Danto, Ronald B. De Sousa, and Stefan Morawski. (This information was supplied in a letter from Eric Hoffman of the APA.) Smith, Nancy R. "The Usefulness of Susanne K. Langer's Structural Analysis for Philosophy of Religion." (PH.D., Southern Methodist University, 1984).

ON LANGER: ARTICLES AND OTHER DISCUSSIONS Anon. "Langer, Susanne Katherina (Knauth)" (Dictionary article). TwentiethCentury Authors: First Supplement. Ed. Stanley J. Kunitz. N.Y.: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1955. See p. 548. Barden, Garrett. "Modalities of Consciousness," Philosophical

Studies (Ireland),

19(1970), 11-54. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. "On the Definition of the Symbol," Psychology and the Symbol. An Interdisciplinary

Symposium. Ed. Joseph R. Royce. N.Y.: Ran-

dom House, 1965. Pp. 26-72. Bertocci, Peter A.: "Susanne K. Langer's Theory of Feeling and Mind," Review of Metaphysics,

23(1969/70), 527-551.

Binkley, Timothy. "Langer's Logical and Ontological Modes," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28(1969/70), 455-464. Biography Index. A Cumulative Index to Biographical

Material in Books and

Magazines. vol. 14: September, 1984-August, 1986. N.Y.: H.W. Wilson Co., 1986. Black, David W. "The Vichian Elements in Susanne Langer's Thought," New Vico Studies, 3(1985), 113-118. Boboc, Al. "Ernst und die semiotische Asthetik," Revue Roumaine des Sciences Sociales, 17(1973), 157-163. Bytniewski, Pawel. "Man as the Animal Symbolicum in the Conception of S. Langer," Annales

Universitatis

Philosophia-Sociologia,

11(1986),

Mariae

Curie-Skilodowska,

203-219.

Sectio

I,

Selected Bibliography

367

Campbell, Harry M. "The Philosophy of E. Cassirer and Fictional Religion," The Thomist, 33(1969), 737-754. Current Biography Yearbook. 1985. N.Y.: H.W. Wilson Co., 1985. The obituary section is located in the back of the volume. Danto, Arthur C. "Mind as Feeling; Form as Presence; Langer as Philosopher," The Journal of Philosophy, 81(1984), 641-647. ---------. "Foreword," Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, the Abridged Edition. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, pages V-VI. De Sousa, Ronald B. "Teleology and the Great Shift," The Journal of Philosophy, 81(1984), 647-653. Detweiler, Robert. "Langer and Tillich: Two Backgrounds of

Symbolic

Thought," The Personalist, 46(1965), 171-192. Donnell-Kotrozo, Carol. "Representation and Expression: A False Antinomy," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 39(1980/81), 163-173. Douglas, G.H. "Croce's Expression Theory of Art Revisited," The

Personalist,

54(1973), 60-70. Dunning, Jennifer. "Battery: A Tribute to Susanne K. Langer,"

Dancemagazine,

50(1976), 23-24. Gardner, Howard. "Philosophy in a New Key Revisited: An Appreciation of Susanne Langer," Howard Gardner: Art, Mind and the Brain. A Cognitive Approach to Creativity. N.Y.: Basic Books, 1982. Pages 48-54. Greer, William R. "Susanne K. Langer, Philosopher, Is Dead," New York Times, p. 12, July 19, 1985. Greger, Sonjy. "Presentational Theories Need Unpacking," British Journal of Aesthetics, 9(1969), 157-70. Hansen, Forest. "The Adequacy of Verbal Articulation of Emotions," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 31(1972/73), 249-53. -----------. "Langer's Expressive Form: An Interpretation," Journal of

Aesthetics

and Art Criticism, 27(1968/69), 165-70. Hardison, O., Jr. "Criticism and the Search for Pattern," Thought, 36(1961), 215-230. Jhanji, Rehia. "Sartre and Langer: Parallels on the Nature of Art Objects," Journal of the Philosophical Association, 13(1971), 99-109. Jeunhomme, J.M.P. "The Symbolic Philosophy of Susanne K. Langer," Neue Zeitschrift

für

Systematische

Theologie

und

Religionsphilosophie,

27(1985), 159-76. Kar, Gitanshu. "Is a Work of Art Symbol of Feeling or an Image of Experience?" Indian Philosophical

Quarterly Supplement,

16(1989), 9-13.

Kates, Carol A. "Psychical Distance and Temporality," Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 20(1971), 75-94.

368

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

Lachman, Rolf. "Susanne K. Langer. Primär und Sekundärbibliographie," Studia Culturologica, 2 (Spring 1993), 91-114. "Langer, Susanne K(aterina Knauth)" [usually abbreviated as K.] Current Biography 1963. Ed. Charles Moritz. N.Y.: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1963. Pages 233-235. Liddy, Richard M. "Symbolic consciousness: The Contribution of Susanne K. Langer," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical

Association,

45(1971), 94-103. Nadeau, Robert. "Cassirer et le Programme d'une Epistémologie Comparée: Trois Critiques," in Jean Seìdenfart: Ernst Cassirer. De Marbourg á New York. Paris: Les Editions Du Cerf, 1990. Pp. 201-218. The New York Times Biographical Service. A Compilation of Current cal Information

biographi-

of General Interest, vol. 16, numbers 1-12. Ann Arbor,

Michigan: University Microfilms International, 1985. The biography of Langer contains a portrait. Nelson, Beatrice. "Susanne K. Langer's Conception (Immaculate?)," The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 8 4(1994), 277-96. Percy, Walker. "Symbol as Need," Thought, 29(1954), 381-390. Poland, Helene Dwyer. "Susanne Katherina Knauth Langer." American

Women

Writers. Ed. Lina Mainiero. Vol. 2. N.Y.: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1980. Pp. 502-504. Price, Kingsley. "Philosophy in a New Key," Philosophy of Music Education Review, 1 1(Spring 1993), 33-43 Radu, Cezar. "Le Concept de 'Forme Expressive' dans l'esthétiquede S. Langer." Stünte Sociale Estetica, 19(Bucharest: Universitatea Analele Seria, 1970), 93-97. Claims that Langer's views are based on Cassirer's and that her views are inconsistent. Read, Herbert E. "Susanne Langer," in Herbert E. Read: The Tenth Muse. Essays in Criticism. N.Y.: Grove Press, 1957. Pp. 239-50. -----------. "Art and Evolution of Man: Lecture Delivered at Conway Hall, on April 10th, 1951." London: Freedom Press, 1951. Reichling, Mary J. "Susanne Langer's Theory of Symbolism: An Analysis and Extension," Philosophy of Music Educaion Review, 1(1993), 3-17. Reid, Louis A. "New Notes on Langer," British Journal of Aesthetics,

8(1968),

353-58. -----------. "Susanne Langer and Beyond," British Journal of Aesthetics,

5(1965),

357-67. Reimer, Bennett. "Langer on the Arts as Cognitive," Philosophy of Music Education Review, 1(1993), 44-60.

Selected Bibliography

369

Rieser, Max. "The Semantic Theory of Art in America," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15(1956/57), 12-26. -----------. "Brief Introduction to an Epistemology of Art," The Journal of Philosophy, 47(1950), 695-704. Rudner, Richard. "On Semiotic Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 10(1951/52), 67-77. Scholz, Bernhard F. "Discourse and Intuition in Susanne Langer's Aesthetics of Literature." Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 31(1972), 215-25. Sheldon, Mark. "Metaphor," Philosophical Forum, 7(1975/76), 56-70. Slattery, Mary F. "Looking again at Susanne Langer's Expressionism," British Journal of Aesthetics, 27(1987), 247-258. Thomas, Edmund J. and Eugene G. Miller. Writers and Philosophers. A Sourcebook of Philosophical

Influences on Literature.

N.Y.: Greenwood Press,

1990. See the "Profiles of Philosophers" beginning on page 215. Turner, Roland, ed. Thinkers of the Twentieth Century. Chicago: St. James Press, 1987. Uglow, Jennifer S., ed. Continuum Dictionary of Women's Biography.

Second

Edition. N.Y.: Continuum Publishing, 1989. Van Roo, William A. "Symbol according to Cassirer and Langer,"

Gregorianum,

53(1972), 487-534 and 615-677. Welsh, Paul. "Discursive and Presentational Symbols," Mind, 64(1955), 1 8 1 - 9 9 . Who Was Who in America, vol. 8, 1982-1985. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who, 1985. Wurmser, Leon. "A Defense of the Use of Metaphor in Analytic Theory Formation," Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 46(1977), 466-98. Yob, Iris M. "The Form of Feeling," Philosophy

of Music Education

Review,

1(1993), 18-33.

SELECTED WORKS RELATED TO CASSIRER'S AND LANGER'S THEORIES OF MYTH Burkert, Walter. Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual. Sather Classical Lectures. Vol. 47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Only a reference to Cassirer and Langer in notes, but the definition of myth is more important. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Bollingen Series XVII. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. Eliade, Mircea. The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Bollingen Series XLVI. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965.

3 70

Cassirer and Langer on Myth

----------. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. N.Y.: A Harvest Book (Harcourt, Brace & World), 1957. Judt, Tony. "Self-serving Myths." Review article of Le Passé D'une

Illusion.

Essai sur l'idée communiste au XXe si_egcle. Paris: Laffont/Calmann-Lévy, 1995. In Times Literary Supplement, p. 25, July 7, 1995. Lovekin, David. "Narcissus and Dionysus and the Birth of Tragedy," The Personalist Forum, 10,2(Fall 1994), 103-118. ----------. Politics, Technology, and Culture: Selected Essays and Writings of Jacques Ellul, ed. and with an intro. by David Lovekin. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Lehigh University Press, Forthcoming. ----------. "The Problem of Politics and Artifacts in a Technological Society." Society for Philosophy and Technology. Group Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, San Francisco, Spring 1980. -----------. Technique, Discourse and Consciousness:

An Introduction

to the Phi-

losophy of Jacques Ellul. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: Lehigh University Press, 1991. The first book-length study to examine the philosophical ideas of the French critic of technology and culture, Jacques Ellul. -------------. "Technology and Culture and the Problem of the Homeless." The Philosophical

Forum, XXIV, 4(Summer 1993), 363-374.

Lyotard, Jean-François. The Dijferend: Phrases in Dispute. Trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Merleau-Ponty. " T h e Sensation' as a Unit of Experience" (234-247) and "The Metaphysical in Man" (318-330). In Perception: Selected Readings in Science and Phenomenology.

Ed. and Intro. Paul Tibbetts. N.Y.: Quadrangle

(The New York Times Book Company), 1969. Peirce, Charles Sanders. Collected

Papers of Charles Sanders

Peirce. Ed.

Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Six volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932. Segal, Robert, ed. and introd. In Quest of the Hero: Otto Rank, Lord Raglan, Alan Dundes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. ------------. Joseph

Campbell:

An Introduction. Garland Publishing, 1987. Repub-

lished in a revised edition in 1990 by Penguin Books. Walker, Steven F. Jung and the Jungians on Myth: An Introduction. Theorists of Myth Series edited by Robert Segal. N.Y.: Garland Publishing, 1995. Whitehead, Alfred North. Symbolism: Macmillan Company, 1955.

Its Meaning

and Effect.

N.Y.: The

Index

Aesop's fables, 68 Agnosia, inability to symbolize and, 61-64 'Air, The," 244 Algonquins, 150, 154 American Indian, 145, 150, 154, 155-156 Analytic Philosophy, 32, 33 Ancestor worship, 146 Anderson, Ken, 233 Animal Farm (Orwell), 48 Animal(s) cause and, 122-123 difference between animal signals and human symbols, 270-271 intelligence and number sense in, 111-112 self-consciousness in, 153 signals versus symbols and, 64-68 things and, 135-137 time and, 101-102 Aphasia, inability to symbolize and, 61-64 Apraxia, inability to symbolize and, 61-64 Ariovistus, 110

Aristotle, 19, 26, 86 Arlen, Micchael J., 244-245 Art Langer's Feeling and Form and, 257-260,291-298 myth as a preparation for, 298 primitive, 141-142 recurrence of myth in, 221 solutions from, 331-333 Arunta, 77-78, 98, 115, 154, 186 Ashbery, John, 44 Astrology, 99, 110, 131-132, 149-150,227 Avesta, 109 Aztecs, 318-319, 325 Babylonian creation myth, 60, 76, 77, 107-108,288,294 Bacon, R, 192, 193 Baeten, Elizabeth M., 44, 340-341 Bantu languages, 137 Bäumler, Alfred, 230 Being and Time (Heidegger), 9 Bidney, David, 18 Biological basis for myth, 299-320 Biological time, 103 Blanshard, Brand, 51 371

372 Blumenberg, Hans, 24, 219, 337 Boas, Franz, 238 Bororos, 145 Buddhism, dialectical evolution by, 183-184 Burial practices, 156 Burkert, Walter, 31-32 Campbell, Joseph, 24, 26, 71, 245, 323, 332, 344 Cassirer, Ernst, overview of his life, 3-16 Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (Krois), 338 Cassirer, Toni, 10 Categories cause of, 118-132 defined, 86-87 inner form based on, 162-164 and number, 110-116 and soul/1,152-159 and space, 89-100 summary of, 164-167 thing, 132-152 time, 100-110 types of, 88-89 unity of, 167-171 Cause/causation animal, 122-123 beginnings of, 122-123 doubts concerning, 118-122 general sense of, pre-individual causes, 126-128 limitations of, 131-132 local, impressionistic, and nonanalytical sense of, 123-125 as logical fallacies, 125-126 magical, 128-130 about origins, 131 rituals of atonement, 130 summary of, 164-167 Cave paintings, 141 Chomsky, Noam, 289

Index Civilization, and the end of tribal society, 317-319 Cohen, Hermann, 40 Cohen, Ronald, 107 Cole, James Lawrence, 23, 29, 35-36, 41 Collingwood, R. G., 196, 203, 261, 293 Continental Philosophy, 33-35 Copernican revolution, 185 Cora Indians, 94, 124 Cosmic time, 109-110 Cosmos numbers and, 114-115 symbols and, 76-77 Creation myths Arunta, 77-78 Babylonian, 60, 76, 77, 107-108, 288, 294 Croce, Benedetto, 293 Cry for Myth (May), 245, 322 Cults of time, 103-104 Culture myths, nature myths, and changes in things during shift to, 147-149 Culture, unity of, 6-7 Cyclical time and sense of eternity, 106-109 Dance, 296-298 Death, handling the concept of, 314-315 Decline of the West (Spengler), 12,95 Demythologization, social causes for, 325-327 Descartes, R., 275 Dialectic defined, 171-174 definition of mythical, 174-175 evolution by Upanishads and Buddhism, 183-184 evolution in Persian-Iranian religion, 182-183

Index evolution in the Old Testament, 179-182 evolution of one myth into another, 178-179 illustrations of twofold movement, 175-177 Durkheim, E., 21 Eggers, Walter, 336 Egyptian Book of the Dead, The, 158 Egyptians, 44, 59, 95, 147-148, 325 burial practices of, 156, 157 imbalance in, 317-318 pyramids, 80-81, 148 soul, 157-158 Einstein, Albert, 5, 6, 42-43, 186, 214 Einstein 's Theory of Relativity Considered from the Epistemological Standpoint (Cassirer), 6, 47, 214 Eliade, Mircea, 21, 30, 77, 79, 106 Ellul, Jacques, 322, 327 Emanism, 146 Empirical studies, use of, 26-30 "End of a Epoch" (Langer), 253, 276 Eskimo, 107 Essay on Man, An (Cassirer), 13-14, 39 magic in, 129-130 signals versus symbols in, 65 symbolic forms in, 50 Essertier, Daniel, 312 Eternity, cyclical time and sense of, 106-109 Ethnic balance, 315-316 Ewe, 112 Expression of images, 73-75 as a universal function, 205-206 Feeling and Form (Langer), 257-260, 291-298 Figi Islands, 114 Flood, Christopher G., 242, 340, 341-343

373 Form of myth, 198-200 Four Theories of Myth in TwentiethCentury History (Strenski), 336 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 255, 269 Functional thinking/method, 49 Furet, F., 234 Galileo, 192,213 Gawronsky, Dimitry, 343-344 Geertz, Clifford, 228 Generative ideas, 274-277 Genesis, book of, 94-95 Genesis Effect, 172 Gestalt Psychology (Köhler), 271 Globalization, affects of, 325-327 Glockner, Hermann, 230 Gods, momentary, 176-177 Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, 233, 236 Goldstein, Kurt, 62, 63 Gombrich, Ernest H., 233 Greeks, 5-6, 23, 76-77, 79, 81, 147, 148, 288-289 moira, 177, 179,220,316 soul and, 157 space and, 99 time and, 108-109 Hamburg, Carl, 11, 53 Head, Henry, 61-62 Hegel, Georg, 4, 5, 33, 41, 42, 87 Heidegger, Martin, 9-12, 33, 94, 230-231 Hendel, Charles, 41, 243 Hertz, Heinrich, 68 Hesiod, 23, 177, 179 Heyse, Hans, 230 Hildebrandt, Kurt, 230 Hitler and the Occult (Anderson), 233 Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (Goldhagen), 233, 236 Holborn, Hajo, 18 Homer, 23, 108, 157, 177, 179

374 Hower, Clarence, 51 "How to Become a Dominant French Philosopher: The Case of Jacques Derrida" (Lamont), 252 Human activity, universal function of, 195-200 Human culture, purpose of self-knowledge as, 184 self-liberation as, 184, 185-186 world unity as, 184 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 84, 276 Hupa Indians, 127 Hurons, 155-156 Ideal limit, 211-214 how myth develops toward, 217-220 purpose of, 215-217 and recurrence of myth, 220-222 Idea of Nature, The (Collingwood), 203 Imbalances in societies, 317-319, 323-325 Incas, 318-319, 325 Initiation rites, 104 Inner form, 84-86 categories and, 162-164 Interpretation of Cultures (Geertz), 228 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 230 Introduction to the Philosophy of Myth (Schelling), 22 Iroquois, 154 Jagga, 144 Jaspers, Karl, 229-230, 261 Jorubs, 96 Judt, Tony, 234 Jung, C., 236-237 Jung and the Jungians on Myth (Walker), 172, 235

Index Kant, Immanuel, 40-41, 86-87, 258 Kirk, G. S., 18, 20-21, 31, 178, 217, 238 Klamath language, 113 Knowing, argument for the plurality of ways of, 42-43 Knowledge idealistic theory of, 35-38 symbolic, 43-45 symbolism and acquisition of, 68-70 Köhler, Wolfgang, 270, 271, 304 Krieck, Ernst, 230 Kroeber, Alfred L., 305 Krois, John M., 32, 41, 219, 226, 231, 338 Kuhn, Thomas, 185,271 Lacedaemonians, 110 Lamont, Michele, 252 Langer, Susanne, 52, 65 creative period of, 255-257 final period of, 262-265 formative years of, 254-255 life of, 251-254 Philosophical Sketches, 254, 260-262 second main period of, 257-260 Language liberation and, 186-190 myth and, 279-281 recurrence of myth in, 221 symbolism and primitive, 78-79 time and primitive, 105 Language and Myth (Cassirer), 48, 199, 256 Le Passé d'une illusion (Furet), 234 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 28, 173, 178, 217,243 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 21, 124, 146

Index Library of Living Philosophers, The (Langer), 256 Life rhythms/biological time, 103 Liszka, James J., 32, 173, 218, 236, 241-242 Logic of the Humanities, 39, 294 Logos, defined, 32 Lovekin, David, 338 Lyotard, J.-F., 179,342 Magic in developing consciousness, 155 mind and, 312-314 as the presentation of religious symbols, 284-286 purpose of, 313 Magical causes, 128-130 Magic circle, 296-298 Magic Mirror: Myth's Abiding Power, The (Baeten), 44, 341 Malays, 145, 155, 156 Malinowski,B.,21,129 Mana, 127, 143-144, 153-154,219 Marcuse, Herbert, 328 Mathematics, 319-320 Maui myth, 287-288 Mayans, 325 Mayer, Sigrid, 336 May, Rollo, 245, 322 Memoirs ofAlbert Speer, 234-235 Mentality ofApes (Köhler), 271 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 12, 231, 267, 335, 345 Mind biological basis for myth, 299-320 death, handling the concept of, 314-315 ethnic balance, 315-316 evolution of, 262-265 magic and power, 312-314 Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling (Langer), 262-265

375 biological basis for myth, 299-320 Modern life coexistence between myth and, 226-228 dangerous political myths, 240-242 imbalances in, 323-325 lack of myths in, 322-329 major shifts in, 306-307 myth outside of politics in, 245-247 Philosophical Sketches and, 260-262 politics and role of myth in, 242-245 recurrence of myth in, 228-232 regression to primitive myth in, 321-322 solutions for, 329-333 technology and existence of myth in, 238-240 Modern people, reactions to, 150 Moira, 177, 179,220,316 Morris, Desmond, 265 Müller, F. Max, 23 Mumford, Lewis, 281 Murray, Edward, 18 Myth, Cassirer's views of defined, 22, 32, 55-56 first stage of, 7-8 formative years of, 3-7 form of, 198-200 modern life applications of, 9-16 reasons for studying, 41-45 second and third stages of, 8-9 structure of, 84-89 Myth, Cassirer and Langer on differences between, 272-274 influence of, 335-338 Myth, Langer's views of against personification, 287-289 biological basis for, 299-320 as a form of feeling, 291-298

376 Myth, Langer's views of (cont.) generative ideas and, 274-277 language and, 279-281 meaning and, 289 as a preparation for art, 298 presentational and discursive, 277-279 regression to primitive, 321-322 religion and, 286-287 Myth and Meaning (Lévi-Strauss), 243 Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts (Gombrich), 233 Mythical thinking defined, 161-162 evolution of, 171-184 as inner form based on categories, 162-164 law of, 161-171 purpose of human culture and, 184-190 summary of categories of, 164-167 unity of categories of, 167-171 Mythic Image, The (Campbell), 71 Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures (Kirk), 178 Myth of the Eternal Return (Eliade), 106 Myth of the State (Cassirer), 9, 14-15, 226, 233 symbolic forms in, 50 worldview of humanity and symbols, 76 Myth of the Twentieth Century (Rosenberg), 230 Mythos, defined, 32 Naked Ape, The (Morris), 265 Nature myths and changes in things, during shift to culture myths, 147-149 Nature of Culture, The (Kroeber), 305

Index Nature spirits, 143-144 in vegetation cults, 154 Nazis/Nazism, 79, 98, 229-230 elimination of responsibility and ethical choice by, 236-238 mythical elements of politics of, 233-235 significance of Jewish people to, 235-236 studies on the myths of, 233 Number(s), 110 animal intelligence and number sense, 111-112 cosmic order and use of, 114-115 early counting methods, 112-114 limitations of, 116 sacred, 115-116 summary of, 164-167 words for, 114 Object. See Thing Objectivization, 32 Odyssey, The, 157 Old Testament, evolution in, 179-182 "On a New Definition of 'Symbol' " (Langer), 261 Orwell, George, 48 Paetzold, Heinz, 338 Palingenesis, 199-200, 201, 221 Pars pro toto principle, 59 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 36, 37, 255, 269 Perception myth and, 200 symbolism and, 57-59 Persian-Iranian religion, evolution in, 182-183 Persians, 103 Personification, myth and, 287-289 Phenomenology of Knowledge (Cassirer), 231 development of, 8-9

Index Phenomenology of Perception, The (Merleau-Ponty), 345 Pherecydes of Syros, 109, 178, 288 Philolaus, 116 Philosophical Sketches (Langer), 254, 260-262 Philosophy, Cassirer's type of, 32 Analytic Philosophy, 32, 33 Continental Philosophy, 33-35 goal of comprehensive theory, 38-40 idealistic theory of knowledge, 35-38 origins of, 40-41 Philosophy, differences between Cassirer and Langer, 339-346 Philosophy, myth and dangerous political myths and role of, 240-242 empirical studies, use of, 26-30 and evaluation of other philosophical explanations, 22-23 general features of, 17-19 irrationality between, 23-24 methodological problems of, 24-25 nonphilosophical definition of myth, 31-32 reconstruction of myth, 31 rejection of theories from other fields, 19-22 solutions from, 330-331 validity of Cassirer's views on, 30-31 Philosophy in a New Key (Langer), 251,255-256,267-269,289 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer) development of, 7-8 expression of images in, 74-75 perception and symbolism in, 58 symbolic forms in, 50 Plato, 23, 44, 79, 151, 275

377 Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (Flood), 242, 341 Political myths, how philosophy can fight, 240-242 Politics, role of myth in, 242-245 Polysynthesis, 146 Postmodern Condition, The (Lyotard), 342 Postmythical worldviews, recurrence of myth in, 220-222 Practice of Philosophy (Langer), 254, 275 Presentational and discursive symbols, 277-279 Primordial/absolute time, 104-105 Primitive consciousness, symbolism and, 59-60 Primitive language, symbolism and, 78-79 Problems of Art (Langer), 257 Purusha, 131 Pythagoras/Pythagoreans, 38, 59, 113, 158,175,276 Reality and knowledge acquisition, symbolism and, 68-70 Reconstruction of myth, 31 Religion and magic as the presentation of religious symbols, 284-286 myth and, 109-110, 286-287 recurrence of myth in, 221 rituals developed from, 283-284 Representation, 206-208 Republic, The, 44 Rieff, Philip, 243 Rigveda, 97 Rites and festivals, time and use of, 105-106 Rituals of atonement, 130 developed from religion, 283-284 world building and, 309-310

378 Roback,A.A., 18 Roman theology, 99-100 Rosenberg, Alfred, 230 Rudolph, Enno, 338 Russell, Bertrand, 214, 215 Sacrament, 281-282 Sacred numbers, 115-116 Schelling, F. W. von, 22 Schweitzer, Albert, 229, 241, 247 Science, myth and differences between, 193-195 how myth remains in science, 201-203 and ideal limit, 211-220 recurrence of myth in, 221-222 relationship of universal function between, 205-211 replacement of myth with science, 191-193 as universal function of human activity, 195-200 Sebeok, Thomas A., 337 Secularization, 326-329 Segal, Robert, 24, 71, 245, 323, 332, 336 Self. See Soul/I Self-knowledge, 184 Self-liberation, 184, 185-186 Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery), 44 Semiotic of Myth (Liszka), 32, 242 Sensation, vagueness of, 140-141 Signals difference between human symbols and animal, 270-271 versus symbols, 64-68 Signification, 206, 208-211 Situation of Our Time (Jaspers), 229 Slater, Philip, 327 Smith, John E., 24 Socrates, 39, 289 Soul/I, 152

Index and animal self-consciousness, 153 burial practices and the soul as a living thing, 156-157 and first mythical consciousness, 153-154 limitations of, 158-159 and magic in developing consciousness, 155 multiple, 155-156 and nature spirits in vegetation cults, 154 and preparation of soul for I, 158 psychic versus spiritual, 157-158 summary of, 164-167 and tutelary spirits, 155 Space/spatial awareness, 89 animal behavior and, 90 human body feelings and, 93-95 imaginary projection of the bodily feeling and, 96-98 and leap from animal to human, 91-93 and position and identity, 99 single- and multicelled organisms and, 90-91 summary of, 164-167 totemism and, 95-96 and transference to nonspatial matters, 99100 Spengler, Oswald, 12,95,231 Spirits, tutelary, 155 Spirit world, 311-312 Strenski, Ivan, 18,244,336 Structure of myth, 84-89 Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn), 185,271 Substance and Function (Cassirer), 4,42,198 Symbolic forms criteria of individual, 51-54 defined, 53 expression of images in, 73-75 list of, 46

Index methodological difficulty of, 48-49 number of, 49-50 phrases characterizing, 45-46 system coherence of, 50-51 and system requirements, 47-48 Symbolic time, 102-103 Symbolism biological basis of, 270, 302-305 difference between animal signals and human, 270-271 difference between Langer and Cassirer, 272-274 generative ideas, 274-277 magic as the presentation of religious, 284-286 myth and (see Symbolism, myth and) presentational and discursive, 277-279 Symbolism, myth and defined, 5 5 - 5 6 development of, 79-80 and disorders that cause the inability to symbolize, 61-64 importance of, 55-60 limitations of, 80-81 material basis/substrate for, 57 and mythical consciousness, 70-75 necessity of, 57 perception and, 57-59 primitive consciousness and, 59-60 primitive language and, 78-79 reality and knowledge acquisition and, 68-70 signals versus, 64-68 and success of myth, 70-73 traits of, 60-61 and unity defined by more than one symbol, 56 world building and, 307-309 worldview of humanity with, 75-78 Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (Whitehead), 254

379 "Technique of Our Modern Political Myths, The" (Cassirer), 79 Technology myth and, 238-240 reactions to, 150 Thing and animal sense, 135-137 and astrology, 149-150 changes in, from nature to culture myths, 147-149 dreamlike character of, 132-133 first human, 137-141 first individual, 143-144 limitations of, 150-151 and modern people and technology, 150 and observation ability, 141-142 other terms for, 133 and polysynthesis and emanism, 146 and relationship with other categories, 133-135 summary of, 164-167 from thou to it perceptions, 151-152 and totemism and awareness of physical, 145-146 validity of, 142-143 in vegetation cults, 144-145 Thinking. See Mythical thinking Time from animal to mythical, 101-102 category of, 100-110 cosmic, 109-110 cults of, 103-104 cultural views of, 5-6 cyclical, and sense of eternity, 106-109 language, primitive, 105 life rhythms/biological, 103 limitations, 109-110 primordial/absolute past, 104-105 rites and festivals, use of, 105-106 summary of, 164-167 symbolic, 102-103

380 Toltecs, 325 Totemism awareness of physical things and, 145-146 spatial awareness and, 95-96 Trinity/Triune God, 113-114 Trumais, 145 Tshis, 155 Uexkiill, Johannes von, 65 Universal function expression of, 205-206 of human activity, 195-200 and ideal limit, 211-220 relationship of, between myth and science, 205-211 representation of, 206-208 signification of, 206, 208-211 Universism, 107 Upanishads, 156, 158-159 dialectical evolution by, 183-184 Usener, Hermann, 176 Van Roo, William A., 18, 19, 38, 216, 253 Vedas, 107, 131

Index Vegetation cults/cultures nature spirits in, 154 things in, 144-145 Verene, Donald Philip, 18, 24, 40, 42, 53, 119, 120, 219, 226, 227, 229, 231, 239-240, 243, 284, 337, 338 Vico, Giambattista, 23, 24, 40, 338 Walker, Steven F., 172, 235, 236, 242 Warburg, Avy, 7, 295 Werner, Heinz, 75, 137 West Africans, 155 Whitehead, Alfred North, 36-37, 254, 269 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 151, 187, 269 Work on Myth (Blumenberg), 24, 337 World building, symbolism and, 307-309 Worldview of humanity, symbols and, 75-78 Yorubas, 155 Zoroaster, 176 Zruvanism, 109 Zunis, 95-96, 115