The face of the times: Ernst Cassirer, Georg Simmel, and the development of the modern German idea of culture

This dissertation evaluates and resituates “culture” as an interpretative paradigm in the humanities and social sciences by examining an important phase of its history in early twentieth-century Germany. Focusing on the work of Ernst Cassirer (1873–1945) in his career-long engagement with his teacher and colleague Georg Simmel (1858–1918), the study details the conflict between the functionalist definition of culture offered in Cassirer's writings and the definition of culture in the dominant “life-philosophy” [Lebensphilosophie] of the period. As advanced by figures such as the philosopher Ludwig Klages and later popularized by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918), Lebensphilosophie claimed that different cultures were essential and perceptible entities. The method of studying culture was based on the model of biological morphology and, more precisely, a ‘characterology’ (Klages) or ‘physiognomy’ (Spengler) derived from the physiognomic study of individuals. Cassirer sought to reformulate the basic assumptions of Lebensphilosophie through a functionalist theory of knowledge that he developed initially as a theory of natural science in his Substance and Function (1910). Functionalism in Cassirer's sense was a type of process philosophy or philosophy of difference that sought to avoid substantive or ‘thing-like’ descriptions of the world in favor of relational descriptions (loosely modeled on mathematical ‘functions’). The challenge that the theme of culture posed to such a theory was how to explain form and the immediacy of personal experience relationally. Cassirer's response to this problem is highlighted in his writings on Simmel, a figure whose work occupies a middle ground between functionalism and Lebensphilosophie. As the means to orient this complex debate in its historical, scientific, and political context, Cassirer and Simmel's theories and methodologies for studying culture are explicated through their reformulation of a central trope of Lebensphilosophie: the problem of ‘physiognomy’ or, in its functionalist definition, the ‘face-to-face’ relation. By this methodological device, the development of the modern definition of culture can be seen to have been shaped by several apparently heterogenous debates, including those on ‘holisitic thinking’ in biology and politics, a political defense of democratic liberalism, a reaction against neo-Kantianism, and a redefinition of the problem of legal individuality.