Cassirer and the Wonder of the New World

The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Applied to the Development of Empirical Practices

'[Magic] penetrates into the understanding of the nature of all things; it draws from the lap of the earth and from its secret storerooms the hidden wonders and brings them to light as though it had created them itself.'1 The development of western scientific thought has been studied by historians for a long time. Nevertheless, the interest in the impact of the discovery of the new world on this intellectual process came into being only recently. In Experiencing Nature : the Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (2006), the American historian Antonio Barrera-Osorio discusses the stimulating effect of the Atlantic World on the creation and development of institutions and institutionalized empirical practices for the study and organisation of the New World. The story of Spanish activities concerning the Atlantic World helps to explain the emergence of empirical practices in sixteenth century Spain, which were the result of the relationship between the empire and its agents. This relationship between artisans, merchants and royal officials, all linked together through the customs, reports and debates of the empire's Casa de la Contractacin, proved not only to be very profitable for the Spanish state, but also exemplary for scientists from all around Europe.2 The particularly practical and utilitarian origins of scientific empiricism can be questioned through the work of the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer. Although, Cassirer is best known for his philosophy of symbolic forms, his studies into the Renaissance period combined with his philosophical ideas present new insights in the development of this new outlook on the world. This is, first of all, the result of his renouncement of the idea that there is only one form of objectivity and rationality, thereby removing the fundamental premises of the empirical theory. Conversely, he recognizes the existence of various ways to experience reality and states that each one of them has its own authentic forms of objectivity, rationality and truth.3 Through these various, alternating ways of experience, it is not only possible to reveal an easily forgotten characteristic of the Renaissance period, but to show the transformation of human thought and the perception of nature as well. As a result of that, the boundaries between usefulness and magic suddenly appear not that insurmountable any more. Cassirer and the philosophy of symbolic forms The philosophy of the German philosopher Ernest Cassirer is primarily concerned with the forms assumed
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Ernst Cassirer, Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosphie der Renaissance (Leipzig & Berlin 1927; translation 1963); p. 149-150. Since the major part of Cassirer's works has been translated, I took the English works to cite from. In the footnotes the original German publication is named first. Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing nature : the Spanish American empire and the early scientific revolution (Austin 2006) p. 16. Koo van der Wal, 'Inleiding', in: Wijsgeerig Perspectief 40:1 (1999/00) p. 2.

by man's understanding of the world and is, therefore, engaged with issues like the possibility of meaning and the way we understand one another. Questions like these, concerning the intersubjective understanding of meaning, are the point of departure for Cassirer's thought. His philosophy partially originates from his critical reflection on Kant's attempts to create a list of pure concepts of understanding.4 According to Cassirer, Kant's transcendental logic wrongfully assumed that common features existed and could be found through the process of systematic comparison. Cassirer objected that these similarities are not found among the natural characteristics of different objects, but were, instead, the result of assumptions about the function of a thing. Moreover, the epistemological focus of Kant and the neo-Kantians and their overstressing of the logical structures of human thought, did no justice to the fact that science is more than just logics. Cassirer finds a solution for these issues by shifting his focus to the problem of representation and the concept of symbolic forms. First of all, Cassirer underlines the constitutive role of representation for all human experience. Unlike Kant, he suggests that things are known immediately and are subsequently represented by signs. This process of representation takes place within the human mind and can best be understood through the concept of the symbolic form, which Cassirer defines as 'the energy of mind through which a mental content of meaning is connected to a concrete, sensory sign and made to adhere internally to it.'5 In other words, the symbolic form is the way any act of interpretation of something experienced is connected with some sort of meaning. Cassirer's philosophy of the symbolic form depends upon his transcendental theory of meaning: the so called symbolic pregnance. This is 'the way in which perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents.' 6 Without this symbolic pregnance it would be impossible to make any sense of the world around us and, as such, Cassirer formulates the relationship between the symbol and the experience of reality. Because of the impossibility to determine what contributed exactly to the experience, Cassirer refers to this with Goethe's idea of the 'Urphnomen'. The 'Urphnomen' of the experience is, therefore, not situated in the smallest, elementary constituents, but in its all-embracing complexity and synthesis.7 Cassirer also underlines his conviction that meaning entirely depends on the context or the field of meaning in which the observer is situated. This explains how it is possible that a cultist, an artist and a mathematician all put a different meaning to the same, randomly drawn line.8 Although, Cassirer's Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923 - 1929) has a predominantly philosophical foundation, it is, at the same time, a study of the morphology of the symbolic form and the way it occurred in human history. It is an account of the ideal historical development of human culture, because
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John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (Westford 1987) p. 45. Ibidem, p. 54. Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie of Symbolische Formen III: Phnomenologie der Erkenntnis (Berlin 1929) p. 202. Translation from: Ralph Manheim, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms III: The Phenomenology of Knowledge (New Haven 1957) p. 235. Frank R. Ankersmit, 'Ernst Cassirer als cultuurfilosoof', in: Groniek 27 (1994) p. 75. Ernst Cassirer, 'Das Symbolproblem und seine Stellung im System der Philosophie' [1927], in: Ernst Cassirer: Gesammelte Werke 17 (Hamburg 2003) pp. 257-258.

'symbolic thought and symbolic behaviour are among the most characteristic features of human life, and [because] the whole progress of human culture is based on these conditions.'9 According to Cassirer, myth, language and technical activity are fundamental for the development of any other symbolic form and, therefore, they are at the base of human culture. From these three, all other symbolic forms develop by evolving through three particular stages. In the first, the mimetic phase, understanding is closely connected to the sensory experience of the world. For example, the word for a numeral stands for things or parts of the body. In the next phase, the analogical one, understanding is oriented towards the mental activity of the subject. In this case, numbers are used for counting or computation without any reference to a particular object. In the last phase, the purely symbolic character of interpretation is fully achieved, because it is no longer considered to be a copy of the world, but a way to make it accessible. Cassirer's works, however, not only demonstrate the movement from mimetic to purely symbolic meaning, he also relates these phases to three different kinds of world views: myth, religion and science. To a certain extent Cassirer reduces this division to the difference between mythic and non-mythic thought, seeing these two as being radically different. In mythic thought, Man lives his life in the world in an enduring state of wonder, hovering between hope and fear and unable to perceive nature and culture as different spheres; 'the nonorganic and organic, plant and animal, human and nonhuman all appear as one society of life.'10 Because science leads to the obliteration of every trace of the mythic world view and myth in all its details denies the scientific conception of things, it is impossible to develop directly from a mythic to a scientific world view.11 Only through the development of symbolic forms mediating between science and myth, can the necessary change of outlook occur. According to Cassirer, these mediating forms are: language and the use of tools.

The New World: a useful wonder? For some time, historians have been occupied with the question of the influence of the increasing contacts with the New World on the development of European thought, science and the relation with nature. According to Antonio Barrera-Osorio, the development of, in his case principally Spanish, thought about the relationship between man and nature, was determined by the idea that nature should be useful to man and empire. The discovery of a new world and the Spanish wish to incorporate this land into an extensive and powerful empire, had some elaborate consequences for the Spanish approach to nature. In the following centuries, a favourable relationship between the Crown and everyone involved in empire building developed, through which commercial culture and the will to enlarge the empire went hand in hand with the development of new empirical methods. In the words of Barrera-Osorio: 'Modern science was the result of state and commercial activities, which did legitimize new practices.'12
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Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History , p. 105. Ibidem, p. 92. Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man (New Haven 1944) p. 62. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing nature , p. 8.

Nevertheless, Cassirer's views about the the development of culture and his study of the Renaissance period, present a totally different perspective of these events. Although Cassirer never occupied himself with the question of the influence of the New World contacts, his Individuum und Kosmos in der Philospphie der Renaissance (1926) offers an interesting insight in the shifting modes of thought from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Except for this particular study, Cassirer displays a special interest in astrology in his other works as well. What most interests Cassirer about this type of science, was not the light it sheds on the demarcation between mythic and scientific cognition, but the fact that in astrology the mythic concept of fate survives.13 In Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, the same expressions of concern for the persistence of mystical or fantastical elements in scientific thought recurs. In this book Cassirer contends that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there was a steady increase in the wealth of directly observed material from which the new image of the world emerged. Simultaneously, a new urge towards the systematic description and order arose from the tendency to directly observe nature. 14 In its earliest forms, the naturalism of the Renaissance seems, then, to take on a strictly empirical character. Still, Casisser asserts, empiricism of itself did not 'possess enough power to become a system of pure experience, and to keep itself free of fantastic admixtures.'15 Thus, the development of empiricism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not the rational and straightforward development process as presented by Enlightenment philosophers and, in a way, repeated by Barrera-Osorio's theses of the New World's influence. The early-modern European botany presents an excellent example of the way a naturalistic mysticism, which sought religious insight in the study of creation, was joined to a mystical naturalism, which sought to uncover magical means of the creation of nature.16 On the one hand, we see how the collection of universal nature within botanical gardens was closely connected to the Christian symbols of Paradise and to the idea of reassembling all the fragments of the original creation. On the other hand, we see how this Christian thought is entangled with pagan idealism, such as Neoplatonism, which directly underlies the early modern ideal of botanic garden as both a resource for healing and a philosophical theatre in which God's truth might be discovered in the diversity of his creations. But botany could only contribute to medicine and the life of the spirit if the true nature of each plant was known. Therefore, the botanic garden, filled with plants from all over the world, became a centre for the study of plants and a place where foreign and European knowledge intermingled. As a result, empirical research developed and a gradual revision of the classical natural philosophy took place.

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Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History , p. 93. Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 149-150. Ibidem, p. 148. Richard Drayton, Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World (New Haven & London 2000) p. 6.

Thus, although Cassirer acknowledges the foundation of exact description and exact experimentation in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, he argues that these are principally expressions of an 'empirical magic'. This type of empiricism uses no other method than inductive observation and the comparison of phenomena, without the analytical-critical limitations which are at the base of a genuine experiment. So, he writes in Individuum und Kosmos in der Philosophie der Renaissance, 'the world of experience here borders on the world of miracles, and both constantly overlap and merge with each other. The whole atmosphere of this science of nature is filled to the brim with miracles.'17 Cassirer's ideas were recently confirmed by different studies in which the magical side of the Renaissance period and its influence on scientific thought were explored. 18 Still, only a few of these paid some attention to the influence of the New World. But it was in this world, with its abundance of new species of plants and mineral wealth, where Europeans rediscovered a mystical system of secret signs and signatures, that could only be unlocked because sixteenth-century Europeans embraced occult knowledges. Moreover, the acceptance of Occult Philosophy was an important condition for the European receptivity of Amerindian traditions of natural knowledge, which led to the colonizers praise and search for the useful conjuring abilities of Native Americans.19 Far from dismissing Native American magic as mere superstition, the early explorers and conquerors frequently attributed efficacy and power to native American empirical knowledge of the environment and its local spiritual forces. This was, among other things, the consequence of the reverberation of European occult traditions, such as Neoplatonism and Hermeticism, within the Native American knowledge. In a way that would become increasingly rare later on, the secrets of Occult Philosophy opened a unique epistemological space of legitimacy not only for apprehending exotic or preternatural phenomena but for the inscription of local forms of knowledge.20 Taken together, the magical elements of European culture act as an important stimulus for the gathering of new and improved knowledge. Yet, according to Cassirer, things changed considerably in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a result of the combination of the intellectualism of mathematics and the theory of arts, with its joint focus on pure forms. When nature is to be grasped in formed images or to be thought of as an orderly necessity, there is no longer place for the particularisation and specificity of the mythic or magic view of nature. Cassirer asserts that the works of Leonardo and Galileo are unique in their early manifestation of the purely symbolic character of interpretation. Here, the stress on the direct sensory experience gives way to the new importance of the ratio and a new method of simplification. In contrast with, for example, Bacon the so-called father of empiricism Leonardo's and Galileo's science is more distanced from the observation and it is exactly this distance between sensory experience and
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Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, p. 152. See for example: William Royall Newman, Promethean ambitions: alchemy and the quest to perfect nature (Chicago 2004); Brian Vickers, Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge 1986). James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (eds.), Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York & London 2008) p. 17. For the importance of European folk medicine, with its often magical and superstitious character, for 'rational' enthusiasm, see also Drayton, Nature's Government, p. 5. See: Ralph Bauer, 'A New World of Secrets: Occult Philospohy and Local Knowledge in the Sixteenth-Century Atlantic', in Delbourgo and Dew (eds.), Science and Empire, pp. 99-126.

the interpretation of the world that characterises Cassirer's scientific symbolic form.21 This new world view developed through the creation of mathematics as the language which, in Galileo's words, is necessary 'to understand the ciphers in which it [the great book of nature] is composed.'22 The use of technology, e.g. Galileo's instruments, made up the other road to the discovery of the objective order, that ultimately took the place of the magical, mythological world and made possible the imposition of man's will over nature.

Conclusion Antonio Barrera-Osorio's notion that Spanish activities in the Atlantic World helps to explain the emergence of empirical practices in the sixteenth century Europe, seems to be to simple. It is true that Europeans steadily turned American nature from a wonder into a curiosity, but this was not only the result of the subjection of nature for utilitarian (political or economic) aims. Wonder and utility could, and did, coexist, especially in Occult Philosophy, which should, therefore, not be dismissed as mere European fantasies rationalizing material plunder and economic gain.23 Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms and especially his studies of the morphology of the symbol in history, led to an entirely new view of the origins and the meaning of empiricism. Cassirer not only points to a substantial characteristic of a period, in addition, he offers a critical theory with regard to the dominance of scientific and economic rationality. All these insights will be very fruitful for further investigations.

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Ernst Cassirer, 'Galileo: a New Science and a New Spirit', in: The American Scholar 1 (1942). Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, p. 165. Delbourgo and Dew (eds.), Science and Empire , p. 102.