Symbolic Cultural Dimension

Semiotics has been brought up since the 20th century. So many philosophers explore it from different perspectives. This article expounds it from a cultural perspective and basics on Cassirer's philosophy. In this paper, I sort out and criticize the classical theory of semiotics at home and abroad, mainly including Ferdinand de Saussure; Pierce and Maurice and others. The conclusion is that they elaborate the semiotics from different perspectives but they ignore the human factors, especially the cultural dimension, so they can't insight into the nature of symbols. Therefore, this article introduces Ernst Cassirer's semiotics from a cultural dimension comprehensively, and finds out the relationship among symbols, culture and human, proposes that the cultural dimension is very important for the semiotics and the language philosophy research. Cassirer describes human as a'symbolic animal', contact human and symbols. Cassirer suggests symbol is basic form of human culture and all kinds of human culture forms belong to symbol. People can invent symbols and use them to create culture. Only in the process of creating culture, human are the true men who get free. Just because the symbol play a decisive role, human enter a'symbol universe'-'human culture world'. The symbol becomes the medium linked human and culture. It also points out that myth, religion, language, art; history and science are all the cultural activities which resulted from human thinking system about symbols. These activities define the range of human nature. That is to say, culture is the way of existence for human. Human's nature is labor, human creat symbols through the labor; Culture is the way of human existence. Therefore, this paper proposes the Humanism of Symbol.