Ernst Cassirer (1874--1945) was a Jewish German intellectual historian and philosopher, the originator of the ``philosophy of symbolic forms.'' After a distinguished teaching career in Germany, he fled the Nazis, first to Oxford, then Goteborg, then finally Yale, which gives an annual series of lectures in philosophy in his honor; he died as a visiting professor at Columbia. Having read and admired his historical works, particularly The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, I was curious about his own doctrines. The summary of them included in his semi-historical book The Myth of the State left me quite confused: reading it gave me no sense of what a symbolic form was, except that it had something to do with what Kant called forms of apperception (no surprise: Cassirer was a neo-Kantian). Similarly, on that basis I couldn't have told you what Cassirer thought a myth was, though it had something to do with emotions whose ``motor-expressions'' were rituals. Now, I don't think I'm a stupid man, or a bad reader. In the line of professional duty I've read a great deal on subjects which are fairly tricky conceptually, like mathematical logic and quantum field theory and learning theory, and it at least felt like I understood them. And I'm not normally blocked by dense prose, either. Nonetheless, what I got from those passages was a diffused feeling of frustrated incomprehension: there was something there, and I just wasn't getting it. (I may add that, pursuing my hobby of psychoceramics, I've read a great deal of dense prose where there really isn't anything to be grasped, and the difference is palpable.) Such befuddlement is, of course, the reason why introductory books are written, so I started looking around for an introduction to Cassirer. Lo: the man wrote one himself, An Essay on Man. The preface tells us it was intended for those who hadn't German enough to tackle the three volumes of his The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, supposedly even ...
