The Recurring Myth. The Idea of Regress in Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture

Abstract

In his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and An Essay on Man, Ernest Cassirer casts mythi-cal thinking as one way in which human beings understand the world. He did so as an impartial scholar, proposing that myth is an inalienable component of human culture-making. Myth, or a mythical interpretation of reality, co-exists with other forms of un-derstanding the world, such as art, science, or language. When Cassirer wrote about mythical thinking as a positive function of the mind, before Nazism stepped onto the stage of history, he had little inkling that myth can have not only poetic and imaginative power, but may also unleash the worst instincts in humans. Following Hitler’s coming to power, Cassirer realised that myth may precipitate destruction, and produced an attenu-ated, “mild” interpretation of myth. It is this corrected understanding of myth in Cassi-rer’s later thought that this text elaborates.