The Critical Difference Between Holism and Vitalism in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Science

Abstract

This chapter surveys Ernst Cassirer’s responses to the vitalist and holist/organicist movements in biology during the early decades of the twentieth century. I argue that examination of the combination of Cassirer’s enthusiasm for holism, and rejection of vitalism, puts into relief many themes and preoccupations that are consistent across Cassirer’s philosophical career, and aids the interpretation of his philosophy of symbolic forms. I propose that it is useful to read the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a critical response to anti-rationalistic tendencies in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and other proponents of Lebensphilosophie. Hence the availability of holism, as a purportedly less obscure alternative to vitalism, suits this broader agenda. At the same time, Cassirer’s acceptance of holism depends on a commitment to the autonomy of biology which is at odds with the physicalism of the Vienna Circle, but consistent with Heidegger’s favourable response to holism in comparison with vitalism. Yet, in the end we are left with an interpretative puzzle about how Cassirer proposes to avoid the encroachment of physicalism into theorising in the biological and human sciences while maintaining his view that progress in science is the result of increasing quantification.

Spinoza would not have spent so much time considering a drowning fly if this behavior had not offered to the eye something other than a fragment of extension; the theory of animal machines is a “resistance” to the phenomenon of behavior. Therefore this phenomenon must still be conceptualized.

Merleau-Ponty The Structure of Behaviour (1942/1967, 126–7).

But we cannot deny that the equation between these two Weltanschauungen has not yet been found, even though it would provide us with all that we are striving for in the relationship between thought and reality. Perhaps it is erroneous to search for a stable balance between them; maybe it characterises the actual rhythm and formula of modern life that the boundary between the mechanistic conception of the world and the Goethean – whether we term that metaphysical, artistic or vitalistic – remains in constant flux. Simmel Kant and Goethe: on the History of the Modern Worldview (1906/1916).

1 Introduction

In the recent outpouring of works examining Ernst Cassirer’s contributions to philosophy of science, far less attention has been paid to his writings on biology than to his numerous publications on mathematics and physics.¹ However, as I aim to show in this chapter, Cassirer’s reflections on the science of biology and the phenomenon of life offer an interpretative perspective which affords a unified view of many of the features of Cassirer’s philosophy that would appear otherwise disconnected. Another lesson of my study is that the influential view of Michael Friedman’s (2000), of Cassirer as a philosopher holding an intermediate position between the logical empiricism of Carnap and the phenomenology of Heidegger, is questionable when one takes into account Cassirer’s philosophy of biology – a topic not reviewed in Friedman’s otherwise valuable book.

The quick statement to be made on the topic of Cassirer and vitalism, is that the philosopher rejected vitalism and endorsed holism or organicism.² The quick explanation for the choice of this position is that Cassirer, staying true to his neo-Kantian heritage, reacted negatively to the ontological inflationism of vitalism in biology – the positing of entelechies, etc.³ – and to the anti-intellectual tone of vitalism in philosophy, exemplified in the writings of Henri Bergson. Yet, as I propose here, Cassirer’s position deserves a more nuanced and involved account than this, and it is worth the trouble constructing it, because of the way that vitalism and the issues around to it – holism, the autonomy of biology, the very notion of vital phenomena – link together some of the disparate, but consistently held motivations for the philosophy of symbolic forms.

In Sect. 2 I discuss Cassirer’s engagement with Lebensphilosophie – the modish (according to Heinrich Rickert)⁴ philosophy of life of the first decades of the twentieth century. Bergson is often (inaccurately) classified as a vitalist in the same manner as Driesch, as well as a philosopher of life.⁵ Given that the culminating third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Phenomenology of Knowledge) begins with a rejection of Bergson’s guiding notion of the immediate intuition of life, one might deduce that Cassirer’s rejection of vitalism is conditioned by his setting this major philosophical project against Bergson, and Lebensphilosophie more generally. However, that would be to ignore the many ways that the agenda of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is continuous with the currents of Lebensphilosophie, especially the work of Georg Simmel who was once Cassirer’s teacher in Berlin.

Section 2 compares Cassirer’s response to the controversy between mechanism, vitalism, and organicism, with that of three philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle and/or logical empiricism – Rudolph Carnap, Philipp Frank, and Ernst Nagel. Vitalism and organicism are both positions that express the autonomy of biology, as opposed to a mechanism consistent with the proposal that the natural sciences be unified under a physicalist standard where observation and linguistic report in biology are carried out under the same terms as in the sciences of non-living nature. As we see in Sect. 3, Cassirer’s rejection of physicalism, and support for the autonomy of biology, are unsurprising given the high rank of Goethe in Cassirer’s pantheon, and Cassirer’s serious engagement with Kant’s third Critique.

Section 3 also addresses the question of why Cassirer favours organicism over vitalism. Again, I show that the origins of this position can be found early in Cassirer’s professional life – in the uptake of holistic principles on display in the 1910 book Substance and Function. The attachment to holism is persistent, and the story of the rise of holism in contemporary science is again told with approval in some of Cassirer’s last publications. The more unexpected finding is the convergence of Cassirer and Heidegger in their specific arguments against Driesch who, it is claimed, did not sufficiently differentiate the causal mode of explanation proper to the physical sciences from the a-causal mode that begins with the sui-generis phenomenon of life.

The role, for Cassirer’s philosophy of biology, of the notion of the basic phenomenon of life, brings up the question of whether the supposedly most “primitive” symbolic form, the expressive function has an ineliminable role to play in the mature natural science of biology. I argue in Sect. 4 that an equivocation on this very question is a symptom of a deeper tension between a radical pluralism and Enlightenment rationalism that each find various outlets within Cassirer’s extensive reflections on scientific thought.

2 Cassirer’s Engagement with Lebensphilosophie

One could even say, as Cassirer did of Aristotle (Krois 2004, 282), that the “centre of gravity” of Cassirer’s philosophy is in the examination of living and not inorganic phenomena. This claim appears arresting, if not straightforwardly false, under consideration of the fact that the bulk of Cassirer’s output in the history and philosophy of science was allocated to the physical sciences. Cassirer wrote three monographs on the philosophy of modern physics but none on contemporary biology. The depiction of the advance of knowledge offered in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 3 is the story of the development of mathematical physics. Correspondingly, the secondary literature on Cassirer’s philosophy of science has made physics central to his thought. However, a different picture is obtained as soon as one considers that symbolic forms are living forms⁶ – that Cassirer’s mobile version of Kantianism is one in which the forms (erstwhile categories) of human thought grow and develop out of one another in an organic fashion; indeed, that the forms of the human mind are an outgrowth from a more comprehensive living order. Furthermore, it is the naturalist, Goethe, who contributes to the notion of living form, and whose influence on Cassirer’s philosophy is pervasive. Cassirer is, in his own way, a philosopher of life, even though his writing places itself in deliberate opposition to the current that runs from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer to Bergson and Ludwig Klages.

We can follow Schnädelbach in describing Lebensphilosophie as, “a philosophical position which makes into the foundation and criterion of everything something which essentially stands opposed to rationality, reasons, concepts or the Idea – life as something irrational” (1984, 141).⁷ Since this is a chapter on vitalism, I will concentrate first on a thinker who has been classified both as a vitalist and a philosopher of life, and with whom Cassirer directly engages – Henri Bergson. On the vitalism side, Bergson maintains that a fundamental vital impulse (élan vital) courses through the development of organic beings, rendering them unknowable by our discursive intellect – a mode of thought which must fall back on mechanistic explanations aiming at practical outcomes. Yet life is susceptible to a different form of intuitive knowing, whose basis is the insight disclosed in our own experience, since we are all living beings with an inner life. In particular, the true nature of temporality, durée, is revealed to intuition but never to the intellect.⁸ The anti-intellectual tenor of this last point is, alternatively, something praised and condemned in Bergson’s philosophy.⁹ At the same time, Cassirer argues, the recourse to a notion of immediate intuition of metaphysical truth puts Bergson in the ancient tradition of metaphysicians (Cassirer 1923/1955, 112). Indeed, Cassirer took Lebensphilosophie to be the modern manifestation of metaphysics (Krois and Verene 1996, xi).

Cassirer’s rejection, but partial incorporation, of Bergsonian ideas, brings to light two of the major impulses that give coherence to the philosophy of symbolic forms: the renunciation of the metaphysician’s ambition of immediate knowledge, in favour of the examination of symbolic mediacy; and the attempt to resolve the apparent conflict between human culture (“Geist”) and the realm of natural life (“Leben”) – a clash much lamented within the Lebensphilosophie of Weimar Germany. Schnädelbach (1984, 148) writes that,

It was above all the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy of the élan vital ….. which introduced temporality as a fundamental dimension into the ‘Absolute’ of life-philosophy. The Heracliteanism of the ontology of life-philosophy was thus given a quasi-epistemological justification. It is astonishing to what degree even those positions which explicitly attacked life-philosophy were affected by it. In the neo-Kantians, Kant’s talk of the ‘manifold’ of sense became a ‘heterogeneous continuuum’, which was founded in the ‘immediacy and irrational intuitiveness’ of ‘experienced life’.¹⁰

While we should not attribute these particular pieces of “neo-Kantian” terminology to Cassirer, the general claim is apt: that Cassirer’s shaping of an alternative to the metaphysical philosophy of life utilised tropes of temporality and vitality congenial to that tradition.

On the first of these impulses – the renunciation of aspiration to immediate knowledge – we may take the introduction to Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 3 as a long argument to the point that the “paradise of immediacy is closed to philosophy” (Cassirer 1929/1957, 40).¹¹ This piece seeks to reveal the inherent flaws within various iterations of the philosopher’s quest for immediate knowledge, including the attempts of Berkeley and Mach to “return to the primal stratum of sensation and its pure facticity” (p. 25). Bergson’s proclamation, from the “Introduction to Metaphysics” that, “La métaphysique est la science qui pretend se passer des symboles” (quoted, Cassirer 1929/1957, 36) is the culminating point in this account – it is “perhaps the most radical rejection of the value and justification of symbolic formation in the whole history of metaphysics” (p. 36).

The Kantian roots of the replacement of a philosophical methodology resting in intuition, in favour of the examination of the forms of cognition and culture, are unmistakable.¹² It is just as important to see how Cassirer’s matching of the Goethean to the Kantian allows him also to make use of the tropes of temporality and livingness. In contrast to Simmel’s essay on Goethe and Kant,¹³ Cassirer’s writing on these two figures emphasises their points of similarity over their differences. Both, for instance, show how one can and must be satisfied with the mediacy of our knowledge of nature:

And the Kantian modesty was also quite congenial to his [Goethe’s] thought. He was satisfied with the ‘colored reflection,’¹⁴ and was convinced that in this colored reflection we possess life itself. ‘We live amidst derivative phenomena,’ he says, ‘and do not know how to arrive at the ultimate question.’¹⁵ This negation of ‘absolute’ knowledge meant therefore no loss to him, and it set no determinate limits to his way of inquiry. (Cassirer 1945a, 96)¹⁶

In addition, it is Goethe who points the way to a cognition of life that is not the deathly, abstract one which repulsed the post-Kantian Romantic philosophers, but is a cognition, through the medium of symbols, nonetheless (Möckel 2005, 82–3).¹⁷ Goethe’s scientific methodology depends on an adequacy of perceptual capacities of the researcher (perception of “facts” being, for Goethe, also a mode of theorization)¹⁸ to the metamorphising forms of nature. Nature, for Goethe, is not the formless churn of the (stereotyped) Heraclitean flux, but a continual turnover of forms that we can aspire to apprehend “if we ourselves remain mobile and supple”.¹⁹ As Hadot (2006, 254) relates, “Form” for Goethe “ is not Gestalt, an immobile configuration, but Bildung, formation or growth.”

Bergson contrasts the immediate intuition of life, with the mere “intellection” of it through the distorting medium of rigid, lifeless concepts:

This empty and immobile space which is merely conceived, never perceived, has the value of a symbol only. How could you ever manufacture reality by manipulating symbols?

But the symbol in this case responds to the most inveterate habits of our thought. We place ourselves as a rule in immobility, in which we find a point of support for practical purposes, and with this immobility we try to reconstruct motion. We only obtain in this way a clumsy imitation, a counterfeit of real movement, but this imitation is much more useful in life than the intuition of the thing itself would be. Now our mind has an irresistible tendency to consider that idea clearest which is most often useful to it. That is why immobility seems to it clearer than mobility, and rest anterior to movement. (Bergson 1903/1912, 52–3)

Cassirer, on the other hand, offers us “mobile” symbols, living forms – and concepts with open-ended extensions that do not elide the individuality of particulars but somehow set them in order with respect to one another.²⁰ There is a debt to Goethe, and to Georg Simmel (Ferrari 1996, 98–99).

Also Goethean is the hope that the relation of mind to life is not inherently adversarial; but I suspect that on this second impulse there is a more direct line of influence from Simmel. The case for the enmity between the intellectual “Geist” and life, or soul, is implicit in Bergson, and explicit in Klages, whose central work is entitled Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Spirit²¹ as Adversary of the Soul). Klages contends that, “life and spirit are two completely primary and essentially opposed powers, which can be reduced neither to each other nor to any third term” (1929, p. vii, quoted in Schnädelbach 1984, 149). ²² In contrast, Cassirer’s position is that we should take Geist – understood here as the formative capacity of human thought and culture – as somehow having grown out of life, and therefore not inherently opposed to life. This claim is subject to extended treatment in the papers published as volume 4 of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer 1996).

Simmel was one of Cassirer’s lecturers during undergraduate studies in Berlin, prior to Cassirer’s induction into the Marburg school, and later a colleague at Berlin (Krois 1996). Simmel’s last book, published in 1918, was a treatise on the philosophy of life entitled Lebenanschauung (The View of Life). The first two chapters are analysed in Cassirer’s “‘Geist’ and ‘Life’” text, the unpublished conclusion to the Phenomenology of Knowledge. Simmel argues that “transcendence is immanent in life” – that there is an inherent tendency for vital processes to reach beyond their present into their past and future. This is the basis for the “turn towards the idea” – life’s negation of its own subjective drive for self-preservation through the positing of the objective ideals of human culture. The human mind, for Simmel, is an outgrowth of life but one whose operations can be tragically destructive of life (Simmel 1918/2010, 61). Cassirer’s disagreement with Simmel, whose picture he mostly incorporates, boils down to a disavowal of its pessimistic implications, the prognosis of ever more vast separation between the mind and life.²³ The “turn to the idea”, Cassirer instead proposes, “cannot be described as life bidding itself farewell in order to go forth into something foreign and distant from itself; rather, life must be seen as returning to itself, it ‘comes into itself’ in the medium of the symbolic forms” (1996, 19). It is interesting also to note that Simmel’s Lebenanschauung exerted a strong influence on Heidegger during the genesis of Being and Time (Levine and Silver 2010, xxvi–xxvii), given that Cassirer and Heidegger presented quite similar criticisms of Driesch’s vitalism (see Sect. 3).

3 The Rejection of Physicalism

Cassirer maintained cordial relations with members of the Vienna and Berlin circles of scientific philosophy, such as Rudolph Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, and was appreciative of their work (Krois 2000; Mormann 2016). That said, Cassirer’s longest, published discussion of Carnap strikes a note of trenchant disagreement over the doctrine of physicalism presented by Carnap in his 1931 paper on the “physical language as the universal language of science” (Cassirer 1942/1961, 96–99). It appears in a late book, the Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften (Logic of the Cultural Sciences). This may seem a little far from our topic of vitalism but, as we will see, their stances towards physicalism condition these two philosophers’ views regarding the autonomy of biology.

The physicalism developed by Carnap and Otto Neurath in the 1930s was not the ontological thesis prominent today in analytic philosophy, but the claim that all meaningful statements about the world can be stated in the physical language of objects bearing measurable properties, located in space and time. It follows that the languages of the various sciences (biology, sociology, psychology) are reducible to physical language (Carnap 1931/1995, 66) and that with this single language in place, the division amongst the sciences disappears, such that a true unity of science is established (Carnap 1931/1995, 96). There is an immediate tension between the doctrine of the unity of science, and views that assert the autonomy of biology, social sciences and psychology. Whereas mechanism is consistent with physicalism and the unity of science, proponents of vitalism and organicism assert that biology is in some sense autonomous from the physical sciences – that it relies on its own laws or concepts, lacking correspondence to ones stateable in the physical language.²⁴

The project of the philosophy of symbolic forms is tied to a pluralism about the ways that objectification and knowledge-making occur. The different departments of human thought and endeavour make use of sui generis symbolic forms, which amounts to their having different “languages” – in the broad sense of symbolic systems. This is not consistent with the elevation of the physical as a universal language (cf. Krois 2004, 280). Thus Cassirer argues for the autonomy of the human and biological sciences, and not for the unity of science in its physicalist formulation. In the next section I will account for why Cassirer opts for organicism/holism over the vitalist construal of the autonomy of biology. In the remainder of this section I will review arguments against both vitalism and holism, set out by three logical empiricists (Carnap, Philipp Frank, and Ernst Nagel) as these offer an important contrast class against which we will compare Cassirer’s case.²⁵

In the “manifesto” of the Vienna Circle, published collaboratively in 1929, we encounter a rejection of Driesch and Reinke’s vitalism on the grounds that it is “metaphysical” (Carnap et al. 1929). It is asserted, however, that there is an “empirically graspable kernel” to vitalism, which is the claim that the laws applicable to the processes of organic nature are not reducible to physical laws – in other words, the thesis of the autonomy of biology. Carnap (1931/1995, 68) informs us that the, “Viennese circle is of the opinion that biological research in its present form is not adequate to answer the question” of reducibility, though the tentative expectation is that reduction will occur (p. 69). But, importantly, Carnap takes the view that the irreducibility of biological laws is not inconsistent with physicalism. Physicalism is only threatened by biology having its own concepts that cannot be defined in terms of “physical determinations”. However, Carnap hastens to add, any such concepts would be metaphysical and ‘nonsensical’, in any case (p. 70). Thus Carnap rules out vitalism and organicism on the same grounds – both of these doctrines posit biological concepts, e.g. entelechy for vitalism, the concept of the ‘whole’ and ‘organism’ for organicism, which evade non-metaphysical construal.

Philipp Frank wrote at greater length than Carnap on foundational issues in biology. In a 1908 publication “Mechanismus oder Vitalismus?”, Frank searches for a precise formulation of this question, especially in the light of the neo-vitalism of Driesch. Frank is even-handed in this paper: he criticizes both litigants for adding to the confusion, while taking the choice between mechanism and vitalism to be currently under-determined by empirical evidence. Only its track record of high heuristic value recommends mechanism over vitalism (Frank 1908, 408). The chapter, “Causality, Finalism and Vitalism” in the 1932 Causal Law book takes quite a different tone. Whereas the 1908 paper emphasizes the analogy between explanations positing vital “constants”, and ordinary quantitative explanations in physics, the later book puts weight on the finalistic and spiritualistic aspects of Driesch’s vitalism, which Frank takes to be a lightly veiled version of “ancient animism” (Frank 1932/1998, 112). Frank is here no more sympathetic to the organicist and holist alternatives to mechanism and vitalism, in spite of the fact that two organicist biologists, Ludwig von Bertalanffy and John Henry Woodger, were associated with the Vienna Circle (Hofer 2002). Frank’s view is that the notion of the “whole” (beyond mere aggregate of parts) has no cognitive content, but “states something meaningful only about the emotional and volitional attitude of the claimant” (Frank 1932/1998, 129).²⁶ As we will see in the next section, this is a point at which Cassirer turns out to be in agreement with Heidegger, and misaligned with the logical empiricists, in spite of his apparently greater kinship with the philosophy of science of the latter group.

More involved arguments against the claim of organicists to be offering a meaningful alternative to both mechanism and vitalism are presented by Nagel (1951a, 1961). I mention this because it pertains to Nagel’s fairly unsympathetic review of the Problem of Knowledge vol. 4²⁷ – the book that includes Cassirer’s most extensive writing on the history and philosophy of biology, with organicism presented as a dialectical synthesis superior to both mechanism and vitalism (Cassirer 1950, 212). Nagel diagnoses Cassirer’s misplaced acceptance of organicism as due to a tendency to “overrate Goethe as a thinker” (1951b, 149) and to be too much in thrall to the Sage of Königsberg:

[Cassirer] finds merit in holism because it confirms in a significant manner Kant’s conception of biological form as a heuristic rule. Opinions on the importance of holism as a philosophy of biology vary even among professional students of living organisms; but in this reviewer’s judgment Cassirer certainly exaggerated its virtues. (Nagel, 1951b, 150)

In the next section I basically concur that the reach of Kant and Goethe is not to be discounted in the explanation of Cassirer’s adherence to holistic approaches to biology. But we will also see that in this Cassirer is also prompted by concerns he shared with the phenomenologists.

In his critical discussion of Carnap (1931/1995), Cassirer writes, of the problem posed by physicalism, that its solution, “can be attained only by a phenomenological analysis.” The task, Cassirer goes on to say, is “to understand each sort of language in its uniqueness – the language of science, the language of art, of religion, etc. We must seek to determine what each contributes to the building up of a ‘common world.’” (1942/1961, 97). He gives the example of the contemplation of a painting which may be taken, under the determined attitude of the physicalist, as being merely a canvas with flecks of coloured paint on it. However, this would be to exclude from phenomenological examination, without justification, the “meaning” of the work, “which is not absorbed by what is merely physical, but is embodied upon and within it; it is the factor common to all that content which we designate as ‘culture.’” (p. 98). We will see that an analogous consideration is at play in Cassirer’s philosophy of biology: to apprehend living organisms in only physicalist terms is to lose the phenomenon – to neglect the way that living beings are first manifest to us in experience – in favour of a theoretically-motivated, unfaithful reconstruction.²⁸

4 Holism Over Vitalism

It is not to be discounted that Cassirer had close personal connections with two prominent scientists associated with holism: the neurologist Kurt Goldstein, who was his cousin, and the biologist Jakob von Uexküll, a colleague at the University of Hamburg.²⁹ However, the case presented in The Problem of Knowledge vol. 4,³⁰ for the validity of organicism over vitalism makes more appeal to the authority of Goethe and Kant (of the Critique of the Power of Judgement) than to any contemporary figure. For instance, Cassirer criticizes Driesch for not, as claimed, staying true to the insights of Kant, but treating purposiveness as a fundamental power instead of a “point of view” (Cassirer 1950, 197–8); and he praises von Uexküll for following Goethe in his recognition that morphology (the study of form, structure) is the proper domain of biology as an autonomous science (pp. 203–5).³¹

The “Vitalism” chapter in The Problem of Knowledge vol. 4 starts with some recounting of the longer history of vitalism in the nineteenth century. More discussion is then allocated to Driesch’s urchin experiments and the arguments for vitalism based on them. Like Carnap, Cassirer does seem to be bothered by the way that the positing of entelechy – something neither existing nor acting within space – takes Driesch beyond science and into metaphysics.³² But unlike Carnap, Cassirer praises Driesch for isolating the singular problem posed by biological knowledge, as distinct from the science of the physical world:

however one may regard his theory or disagree with its metaphysical implications, there is no denying that through his experiments and the questions that he raised in connection with them, Driesch contributed greatly to defining the characteristic methodological principle and problem of biology. (Cassirer 1950, 197)

According to Cassirer, von Uexküll’s methodology provides a surer basis for the autonomy of biology, than Driesch’s, because the starting point is anatomy rather than physiology (1950, 199). As he puts it, “[w]hile Driesch in his conception of entelechy wanted to demonstrate a specific autonomy of function, Uexküll started from the autonomy of form” (p. 200). This means that the biologist can avoid confrontation with the dynamical-causal explanations proper to physics, and take the study of biological structure as its own independent territory. This being possible because form, here, is not of the material sort studied in physics, but something more analogous to the ideal figure in geometry:

Structure is not a material thing: it is the unity of immaterial relationships among the parts of an animal body. Just as plane geometry is the science not of the material triangles drawn on a blackboard with chalk but of the immaterial relationships between the three angles and three sides of a closed figure. (von Uexküll, quoted in Cassirer 1950, 200)

Uexküll’s positing of a biological concept, form, not definable in terms of physical determinations raises his biology above the bar set by Carnap for scientific autonomy; of course it would also raise Carnapian suspicions of being hopelessly metaphysical – but those are not worries shared by Cassirer over this notion.

That Cassirer is open minded about this concept of form is probably due to his consistent endorsement of holistic notions across the sciences. As we saw in Sect. 2, Frank and Schlick shared an incredulity towards claims that organisms or social groups comprise wholes which hold some ontological or explanatory status independently of their parts. In contrast, we find in Cassirer (1910/1923, 333–4) an early endorsement of the claim of Gestalt psychology that, “[n]ot only the parts as such, but also their whole complex always produces definite effects upon our feeling and presentations”, an endorsement reiterated much later in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942/1961:170–2). In a late paper, “Structuralism in Modern Linguistics”, Cassirer describes how physics, like psychology, broke away from the “classical tradition” and availed itself of the notion of the field which has ontological priority over material parts:

The electro-magnetic field – in the sense of Faraday and Maxwell – is no aggregate of material points. We may, and must, indeed, speak of parts of the field; but these parts have no separate existence. The electron is, to use the term of Hermann Weyl, no element of the field; it is, rather, an outgrowth of the field (‘eine Ausgeburt des Felds’). It is embedded in the field and exists only under the general structural conditions of the field. (Cassirer 1945b, 101)

Given that the concept of form most relevant to organicist biology is the notion of the whole organism whose maintenance physiological processes appear to be directed towards,³³ it is not surprising that Cassirer treats it as irreducible to collections of component parts.

Indeed, Cassirer takes the notion of wholeness in biology to be a metaphysically non-committal replacement for the old ideas of teleology and purpose:

To employ a teleological method in the study of living organisms means only that we examine the processes of life so as to discover to what extent the character of preserving wholeness manifests itself. (Cassirer 1950, 213)

The expression ‘wholeness’ has the advantage of being completely free from hypothesis. It contains nothing psychic, nor does it assert that the events of life must always proceed in such a way as to achieve the highest degree of purposiveness. (Cassirer 1950, 213–4)

The other advantage of the version of autonomous biology that is based in the structural concept of the whole is that it allows for a division of labour between structural and causal explanation, with the latter being left to physics.³⁴ Here the acausal notion of the whole, or form, replaces the final cause. Two passages illustrate this move, the first with reference to Uexküll, the second building up to an appreciative discussion of Bertalanffy’s 1932 book, Theoretische Biologie:

In Uexküll’s opinion physics is entirely correct in seeking to explain all connections in the world in terms solely of causality, but quite wrong if that means banishing every other mode of thinking from science. ‘For causality is not the only rule at our disposal for construing the world.’” (Cassirer 1950, 203)

Modern biology has not followed Driesch. But neither has it reverted to the ‘machine theory of life.’ It has avoided both extremes while concerning itself more and more with the purely methodological significance of the problem. For it, the primary question is not whether organic forms can be explained by means of purely mechanical forces; instead the emphasis falls on the fact that organic forms cannot be fully described through purely causal concepts. In demonstrating this it invokes the category of ‘wholeness.’ (Cassirer 1942/1961, 168)

The second passage is part of an argument that the cultural sciences (humanities) must take the lead from biology in seeking their autonomy from the physical sciences via the study of sui generis forms.³⁵ The doctrine of physicalism, and the Unity of Science movement of which it was a part, was an attempt to dispense with the much discussed division between human and natural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften) (Carnap 1931/1995, 31–32).³⁶ It is noteworthy that Cassirer, in order to resist physicalism, places biology, alongside the humanities, as a science of form, shifting it from its traditional place alongside the natural sciences of the non-living world.

We now come to the comparison of Cassirer and Heidegger on the matter of vitalism. Both of these philosophers drew heavily from von Uexküll’s notions of the organic, animal life and the formation of experiential worlds.³⁷ Both are critical of Driesch’s vitalism. Where it goes wrong, they say, is in offering explanations of life that hypostatize vital forces conceptualized in the manner of physical forces – by treating life as explicable via causal principles, but of a different sort from causal-mechanical laws. This could not be more different from Frank’s (1908) account, which takes no issue with Driesch treating vital forces in the manner of physical ones, but does not find a compelling enough case to be made for positing them. Driesch’s physics-inspired methodology is a positive attribute, for Frank, not a liability; though subsequently, Frank (1932/1998) expressed objections to Driesch’s attempts to emulate the pattern of physical explanation.

Cassirer draws from the third Critique the lesson that biological explanation must go beyond causation. Kant, he writes,

insisted that these causal laws alone cannot enable us to become even acquainted with that special realm of the phenomena confronting us in organic nature, to say nothing of completely ‘explaining’ them. Here is the role of that other principle of order, which we call purposiveness. (Cassirer 1950, 198 emphasis added)³⁸

Hence Driesch is criticised for his divergence from Kant. Likewise, Heidgger objects to the rush for causal explanation of distinctive properties of organisms, namely, self-production, self-regulation and self-renewal:

The facts clearly do not allow us to doubt what has been said. What we have said also gives us a pointer to the peculiarity proper to the organism as against the machine, and thus also to the way in which organs belong to the organism as against the way in which machine components belong to the machine. And yet this pointer is still dangerous because it can, and repeatedly does, lead to the following conclusion: If the organism possesses this capacity for self-production, self-regulation and self-renewal, then the organism must contain an effective agency and power of its own, an entelechy and a vital agent which effects all this (a ‘natural factor’). But this conception simply eliminates the problem, i.e., it no longer allows one to arise. Thus the real problem which is involved in determining the essence of life cannot even be seen because life is now handed over to some causal factor. (Heidegger 1995, 222–3)

What both find problematic about the encroachment of causal explanation is that it threatens appreciation of the unique phenomena of life. As Cassirer relates from Kant (in the quotation from the previous paragraph), the exclusive causal treatment “cannot enable us to become even acquainted” with those phenomena. This is how Heidegger makes a similar point, but without any explicit reference to Kant:

Thus Driesch was driven by his experiments to adopt his biological theory, known as a neovitalism, which is characterized by the appeal to a certain force or entelechy. This theory is repudiated in large measure by biology today. As far as biological problems are concerned, vitalism is just as dangerous as mechanism. While the latter does not allow the question of purposive behaviour to arise, vitalism tries to solve the problem too hastily. But the task is to recognize the full import of this purposive striving before appealing to some force which, moreover, explains nothing. (Heidegger 1995, 262)

As mentioned at the end of Sect. 2, a feature of phenomenologists’, like Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger’s, writings on biology is a concern not to “lose the phenomenon” in the midst of in-apt physicalistic descriptions that do not relate the features of living beings as they occur to us, irreducibly, in experience. It is telling that Cassirer concurs with them on this point, and that he takes it to be a lesson learned from Goethe:

The fundamental reality, the Urphänomen, in the sense of Goethe, the ultimate phenomenon may, indeed, be designated by the term ‘life.’ This phenomenon is accessible to everyone; but it is ‘incomprehensible’ in the sense that it admits no definition, no abstract theoretical explanation. We cannot explain it, if explanation means the reduction of an unknown to a better-known fact, for there is no better-known fact. (Cassirer 1942/1979, 193–4)

While not attempting “explanation”, in drafts written around this time Cassirer (1996, Part II, chap. 2) himself deploys the notion of “basis phenomena” beginning, of course, with an analysis of Goethe.³⁹

5 An Interpretative Puzzle

In this final section I spell out one implication of my examination of Cassirer’s response to vitalism for broader issues in the understanding of his philosophical project. The larger matter is the way that Cassirer attempts to uphold a progressivist narrative about the advance of science through the increasing mathematization of natural phenomena, while at the same time acknowledging concerns about the depersonalised character of the scientific worldview which attends this development. Cassirer’s support for the autonomy of biology is not, strictly speaking, consistent with his progressivism. This leads to an unacknowledged tension within Cassirer’s writings about the relative status of the non-scientific (“expressive”) and physical-quantitative modes of apprehending nature, as I will now show.

In the second chapter of Logic of the Cultural Sciences Cassirer contrasts “perception of things” with “perception of expression”, finding here the basic grounds for the distinction between natural and human sciences. In expression-perception we observe the world “as if it were something ‘like ourselves’” – a bearer of subjectivity (1942/1961, 93), lacking causal determinacy (p. 94). In thing-perception, “we observe it [the world] as a completely spacial [sic] object and as the sum total of temporal transformations which complete themselves in this object” (p. 93); it is prerequisite for theoretical explanation and causal discovery (p. 94). Given that Cassirer rests the autonomy of biology, like that of the humanities, on the idea of an acausal knowing of form or structure (see 1942/1961, chap. 4), should we infer that for Cassirer, expression-perception is requisite for observation in the science of biology, for apprehension of the basic phenomenon of livingness, as well as for the appreciation of cultural objects like works of art? The interpretative puzzle is that Cassirer does not give us an unambiguous answer to this question.

There are passages that support an affirmative answer in Part 1 of Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol. 3, where the notion of expression perception gets its first lengthy exposition.⁴⁰ For example:

the reality we apprehend is in its original form is not a reality of a determinate world of things, originating apart from us; rather it is the certainty of a living efficacy that we experience. Yet this access to reality is given us not by the datum of sensation but only in the original phenomenon of expression and expressive understanding. (Cassirer 1929/1957, 73 emphasis added)

And also he writes of the “expressive function”, which is dominant mindset of the “mythical world” that it,

can never wholly enter into this form [of physical causal relations] and never be submerged in it – for if it did so, not only would the mythical world of demons and gods disappear, but the fundamental phenomenon of ‘livingness’ as such [das Grundphänomen des ‘Lebendingen’ überhaupt] would vanish. Thus we see that the basic motif of consciousness which we have recognized as the actual organon of the mythical world intervenes at a decisive point in the structure of empirical reality (Cassirer 1929/1957, 88)

But a problem with this first interpretation – that the biologist’s apprehension of the basic phenomenon of life depends on an employment of expression-perception – appears in a third passage from the same exposition of the expressive function:

there is a kind of experience of reality which is situated wholly outside this form of scientific explanation and interpretation [naturwissenschaftlichen Erklärung und Deutung]. It is present wherever the being that is apprehended in perception confronts us not as a reality of things, of mere objects, but as a kind of presence of living subjects [Art des Daseins lebendiger Subjekte]. (Cassirer 1929/1957, 62 emphasis added)

The issue is that this “perception of life” is reported as lying “wholly outside….scientific explanation and interpretation.”

This lays ground for a negative answer to our question, one supported by some passages in the Logic of Cultural Science, where Cassirer describes the increasing de-personalisation of the worldview (dare we say, disenchantment) that has accompanied the development of natural science. He writes that,

Natural science, as such, should and must be free to determine its way to the attainment of this goal. Not only does it seek increasingly to suppress all that is ‘personal’ it strives toward a conception of the world from which the ‘personal’ has been eliminated. It achieves its true aim only by disregarding the world of self and other. (Cassirer 1942/1961, 103–4)

Lest we think that an exception might be made for biology, Cassirer adds that,

Even biology must not hold back; even for it, the dominance of ‘vitalism’ appears to have come to an end. Thus life is not only expelled from the inorganic, it is also banished from organic nature. Even the organism is subject to the laws of mechanics, the laws of pressure and impact, and without qualification.

All attempts to oppose this radical ‘devitalization’ of nature with metaphysical arguments have not only miscarried but have compromised the very cause they have sought to serve. (1942/1961, 104)

And he goes on to describe the failed project of Gustav Fechner to resist this tendency. It is significant here that “vitalism” is equated with the attempt to retain a personalized view of organic nature, and mechanism is depicted as the inevitable outcome of scientific development.⁴¹ The connection between vitalism and personalization makes sense of the linkage between the perception of subjectivity and the perception of life that is on display in the passages quoted above.

Yet curiously, later in the same book, organicism is championed as the alternative to both mechanism and vitalism, and a path to the autonomy of biology (p. 168, quoted above).

Given that we find passages within the same text that support either the affirmative or negative answer to our question, we cannot put the problem down to Cassirer changing his mind over time. A plausible explanation is that the equivocation over the role of expression-perception in the natural science of biology is symptomatic of an underlying and unacknowledged tension in Cassirer’s philosophy. There are two fundamental commitments in Cassirer’s worldview that seem to jostle for supremacy. On the one hand he is a deep pluralist, endorsing the validity of a multiplicity of a symbolic worlds, each generating objects on their own conceptual terms; on the other he is a proponent of the commonplace narrative, associated with Enlightenment ideals of rationality, of mono-directional human progress towards the form of thought perfected in the exact sciences. As Carus (2007) relates, the philosophy of Carnap is one late occurrence of this Enlightenment project. The grand narrative structure of the Phenomenology of Knowledge is, likewise, in keeping with this tradition, where human thought is described as emerging from a “primitive” state, governed by mythological ideas, towards an “advanced” mindset that allows for the achievements of mathematical physics.

On the monotonic, progressivist narrative there should be no special role for “primitive” expression perception in biology, insofar as it is a ‘mature’ natural science. Yet without a distinct mode of perception for living beings, Cassirer has no principled grounds to reject a physicalism that denies the autonomy of biology. Cassirer’s deep pluralism does allow for an autonomy of biology, and a view about the irreducible nature of living phenomena that is close to that of phenomenologists such as Heidegger. But unlike the phenomenologists, Cassirer declines to package these ideas with a generalised criticism of scientism within philosophy and wider culture.⁴²

Therefore, it appears not that Cassirer is an intermediate figure between Carnap and Heidegger (as Friedman 2000 would have it), but that his philosophy is liable, like the Necker cube, to an aspect switch, depending on whether his pluralism or his progressivism is seen to be standing in the foreground. When the pluralism juts out, one finds a Cassirer closer to the phenomenologists;⁴³ when the progressivism projects forward, the philosophy of the Vienna Circle is not far away. This chapter begins with a quotation from Simmel who describes the modern condition as one experiencing a kind of nervous oscillation between worldviews, alternately “mechanistic” (and, we may add, physicalist) or “vitalistic”, Goethean and “artistic”. Cassirer’s vacillation on the role of the expressive function in the modern science of biology seems the perfect example of this:⁴⁴ it is not mere logical inconsistency, or lack of systematicity on Cassirer’s part, but suggestive of something more deeply felt in Cassirer’s response to the problem posed to philosophy by the apparent directionality, the semblance of a telos, manifest in the historical trend named modernity.