AN ESSAY ON MAN This page intentionally left blank AN ESSAY ON MAN AN INTRODUCTION TO A PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN CULTURE BY ERNST CASSIRER A VERITAS PAPERBACK NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Yale UNIVERSITY PREss Veritas paperback edition, 2021 Copyright © 1944 by Yale University Press Copyright renewed, 1972 by Henry Cassirer and Anne Applebaum Introduction to the Veritas paperback edition copyright © 2021 by Peter E. Gordon All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. An Essay on Man was first published in 1944 by Yale University Press. Printed in the United States of America The Library of Congress has catalogued an earlier edition as follows: Cassirer, Ernst, 1874–1945 An essay on man: an introduction to a philosophy of human culture/by Ernst Cassirer. p. cm. Originally published: New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Milford, 1944 Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-300-00034-4 (pbk) 1. Philosophical anthropology. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Civilization—Philosophy. 4. Symbolism. I. Title. B3216.C33E8 1992 901 — dc20 92-3163 CIP Veritas Paperback Edition ISBN: 978-0-300-25407-5 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 TO CHARLES W HENDEL IN FRIENDSHIP AND GRATITUDE This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS INTRoduCTIoN by PETER E. GoRdoN ix PREfACE xvii PART I. WHAT IS MAN? I. ThE CRISIS IN MAN’S KNowlEdGE of hIMSElf 1 II. A CluE To ThE NATuRE of MAN: ThE SyMbol 23 III. fRoM ANIMAl REACTIoNS To huMAN RESPoNSES 27 IV. ThE huMAN woRld of SPACE ANd TIME 42 V. fACTS ANd IdEAlS 56 PART II. MAN AND CULTURE VI. ThE dEfINITIoN of MAN IN TERMS of huMAN CulTuRE 63 VII. MyTh ANd RElIGIoN 72 VII. lANGuAGE 109 Ix. ART 137 X. hISToRy 171 XI. SCIENCE 207 XII. SuMMARy ANd CoNCluSIoN 222 INdEx 229 This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION Peter E. Gordon CAN any meaning at all still be found in that old and often battered word humanism? Over the course of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first, so many arrows have pierced this once heroic ideal that it now resembles Saint Sebas- tian, bound to a tree and always just about to die. But much like the martyr himself, humanism has shown a miraculous ability to survive its wounds, and a faith in humanity seems to persist even when the evidence against it may appear overwhelming. Perhaps no document of the recent past better exemplifies the improbable persistence of this ever-dying idealism than An Essay on Man, a book that Ernst Cassirer completed in 1944, not long before his death the following year. Few works of philosophy have ever seemed as antiquated, and fewer still as necessary, since it may serve as a reminder of what we still might be. It is a hymn to humanity in an inhuman age. An Essay on Man was written as the final summation for the Anglophone world of themes that Cassirer had developed much earlier and at greater length in the three successive volumes of his formidable study The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, originally published in German between 1923 and 1929. If the earlier study is systematic, the later work is an exercise in compression: it is a sur- vey that looks across the terrain that has already been charted and offers a retrospective report on the major landmarks of his thought. Among his many writings, it is also the most accessible: it avoids much of the technical vocabulary that Cassirer used elsewhere in his oeuvre and which may strike readers as forbidding. For this reason it can serve as a helpful point of departure for those who are interested in further exploring his unique vision of philosophy. Cassirer was born in 1874 and died in 1945; his life and work can therefore be situated within the most dramatic phase of mod- ern German history, opening with Bismarck’s founding of the Wil- helmine empire in 1871, and concluding with the downfall of the