Culture in the Reflections of Ernst Cassirer

Abstract At the level of assumptions, Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms is related to Marburg’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendentalism. H. Cohen and P. Natorp limited the scope of philosophy to the traditionally understood epistemology. Cassirer goes beyond this approach, even though he refers to Kant’s own solutions; the dominance of a priori elements in cognition and their type and character is Cassirer’s assumption and starting point. According to the Königsberg philosopher, as well as Natorp and Cohen, the analysis of cognition consists mainly in examining the formal conditions of scientific cognition. Cassirer’s approach goes beyond this narrow methodological framework by assuming that the activity of the human spirit is not exhausted by scientific rationality; namely, that in addition to scientific rationality, there are other types of activity and other forms of a priori conditionings. This means that epistemology should transform into a broadly understood philosophy of culture and aim to recognize all a priori forms that organize the world of human experience and show their logical structure. Therefore, the subject of philosophical reflection should be myth, religion, language, art, science as symbolic forms of a a priori integration of human experience, and philosophy should become the philosophy of culture.