Cassirer's Advance Beyond Kant's Epistemology

Cassirer's epistemology has not attracted enough attention and comprehensive study,in great contrast to the favored cultural philosophy in his later ages.Regarding this contrast,first of all,it restricts our grasp of the wholeness of Cassirer's thought and the understanding of some important concepts in his philosophy of symbolic forms.Secondly,there is indeed an underestimation of the significance of Cassirer for the development of Kant's epistemology.In addition,this lack shows that we have not yet completely understood the significance of Cassirer's work in the transformation of the mode of thinking in modern philosophy.Cassirer's philosophy,as a systematic construction of generalized epistemology,starts from the constructivist principle of Kant's Copernican Revolution,and contains the whole idea of promoting Kant's epistemology,systematically overcoming some limitations and incompleteness in Kant's philosophy.Only when the internal logic of Cassirer's development of Kant's epistemology is explained can Cassirer's thought be fully understood.In order to solve the defects and problems of the traditional epistemology,Kant regards the object as the spontaneous construction of the cognitive subject,rather than the assumption that knowledge corresponds to the object.By distinguishing the form and material in our experience,Kant considers the function of the forms is the synthetic unity with perceptual material.In contradistinction to the forms all contents of knowledge are given through the contacts of experience—this is the material and it is assimilated and understood only by virtue of the a priori forms of both intuition and thought.The transcendental method of Kant's philosophyis is to try to discover and determine the a priori forms that makes the experience possible.Cassirer regards this transcendental method and constructivism as the principles of his own philosophy,and extends to the more general field of cultural facts.There are some important ideological sources in the development of Cassirer's thought.First of all,although the philosophy of symbolic forms is usually regarded as the transcendence of Cassirer's early thoughts in neo-Kantian Marburg School,it is certain that Cassirer is still influenced by the thoughts of Cohen and Natorp,among which the most obvious ideas is the transcendental method developed by Marburg School and genetic epistemology.Cassirer's cultural philosophy can be traced back to the cultural philosophy put forward by Marburg School.The transcendental method is to find and determine the intellectual principle or a priori forms supporting scientific or cultural facts from those facts existing.Cassirer undoubtedly extended this transcendental method to a wider range of cultural fields,such as the study of myth,language and art.The transcendental method of Marburg School is an important aspect of understanding Cassirer's philosophy.Secondly,because the symbolic function of consciousness is the basis of the “deduction” of cultural form,psychology bears the function of laying a logical foundation for philosophy of symbolic forms,among which Cassirer is greatly influenced by intentional psychology.Brentano and Husserl's thoughts of intentionality influenced Cassirer's understanding of conscious activity and essence,while Husserl's distinction between neoma and noesis influenced Cassirer's elucidation of the concept of representative function of consciousness.Gestalt psychology's viewpoint that the whole perception is greater than the sum of elements enables Cassirer to regard perception itself as a whole meaning,and the perceptual factors and meaning factors in perception as an inseparable unity,which influences Cassirer's concept of symbolic pregnancy.By absorbing the psychology of intentionality,Cassirer made a further revision of sensitism and overcame the residual of sensitism in Kant's philosophy.At last,Hegel's phenomenology of spirit influenced Cassirer's holistic view of cultural forms,which made Cassirer insist that philosophy must cover all kinds of cultural forms,and all of them can't be presented at once,but can only be gradually developed in its own independent movement and rhythm through thoughts.Following Hegel's phenomenology of spirit,Cassirer regarded different spiritual forms as a dialectical ascending process,and regarded all symbolic forms as an essential part of the developing process of phenomenology of knowledge.Mythical perception evolved dialectically into language,and language evolved dialectically into science.Cassirer traces the origin of human spirit and consciousness from Hegel's perceptual certainty to the stage of mythical perception.Cassirer's development of Kant's epistemology involves a wide range of issues.He replaced Kant's original static version of constitutive principles of the understanding,from functional conception of knowledge,with relative a priori constitutive principles in the exact science.Within the scope of cultural science,Cassirer extended the constructivist principles and transcendental methods to the fields of cultural facts and general experience,thus overcoming the crisis of cultural objectivity and value caused by the naive realism and sensualism epistemology,providing an adequate methodological basis for cultural science,and accomplishing the transition from “critique of reason” to “critique of culture”.Cassirer expanded Kant's theory of synthetic unity into the function of “giving meaning” to experience and integrating and unifying materials by various cultural forms through the thought of symbolic forms,and tried to show the rules of configuration of each symbolic form and objectification field.In the philosophy of symbolic forms,Cassirer also devoted himself to completing a kind of “deduction” of the critique of culture or cultural forms like Kant's transcendental deduction of categories,that is,explaining how each cultural forms makes experience construct into a structured whole,thus confirming the objective validity and unity of various cultural forms.In the “deduction” of cultural forms,the symbolic function of consciousness,especially the representation of consciousness,plays an important role,which is not only the key to “deduction”,but also the premise of consciousness construction and unity.By acting as a substitute,the perceptual content of another content appears in consciousness,which becomes the “symbol” compared to the replaced content.Therefore,it is through the function of representation that the factors of meaning can transform itself into the corresponding symbol,the concrete content of consciousness becomes the symbol with universality and particularity,and the form can realize itself through the medium of symbols.The activity and creation of human spirit must be possible by means of symbols,so the symbols become the activity and energy of human spirit.Therefore the concept of “symbolic forms” should be understood as“symbolic forms” or “forms which realized by the symbols”,that is to say,the form has its own essence,and the symbol,as the medium or realization of meaning,depends on and serves its essence.Through the idea of symbolic forms,Cassirer expanded Kant's cognitive objects into more general objects,and extended the constructive role of subjects in the cognitive objects to all fields of objection,and transformed Kant's transcendental anthropology into philosophical anthropology.