John Michael Krois

Philosophical Anthropology before and after Ernst Cassirer

‘Philosophical anthropology’ was initiated in the late 1920s as an alternative to abstract philosophical definitions of human nature (‘animal rationale’) and to the exclusively empirical, physical study of anthropology. Philosophical anthropology focused upon what it meant to be a human being. Its founders concentrated upon the situated existence of human beings and their ability to think beyond and to deny even what was actually vitally important to them. For Cassirer, these efforts remained too abstract because they failed to take the breadth of human cultural activity into account. The decisive feature of human life is neither reason nor language. These are derivative from symbolism, not the other way around. Human beings are best described as ‘animal symbolicum’. The error of earlier anthropological conceptions was not that they venerated reason, but that they ignored the body and so separated reason from emotion. The concept of symbolism, as Cassirer conceived it, overcame this dualism. His philosophical anthropology has been vindicated today in many areas of empirical research, but replacing the concept of ‘reason’ with that of ‘symbolism’ was no minor revision to the Western philosophical tradition, and the amplification and application of this new outlook has barely begun.

A Note about Philosophy and History: The Place of Cassirer's Erkenntnisproblem

Although Cassirers four-volume Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit has long been highly regarded as an example of historical scholarship — Cassirer was awarded the golden Kuno-Fischer Medal of the University of Heidelberg in July 1914 for the first two volumes (published 1906 and 1907) — its importance for understanding his theoretical position seems to have gone unrecognized. In the English-speaking world it is, unfortunately, only known through the fourth volume, and when this appeared in English in 1950 it met with a negative, even hostile, reception (see Passmore 1968, 315f.).