The Modalities of the Symbol Concept

Abstract

Upon defining and considering objections as well as a possible defense of Cassirer’s symbol-concept, we have come to the conclusion that it formulates, on a level of highest generality, the thesis that neither sense-data nor thought by itself can account for those peculiar and specifically organized forms in which, as a matter of cultural fact, we alone can experience “reality” in its various mythico-dramatic, perceptually pragmatic and theoretical-scientific aspects. This tenet of the philosophy of symbolic forms, namely that in all dimensions of experience-accounting we can, upon analysis, distinguish differently oriented perspectives, types of “synthesis”, directions of “sight” as so many forms of evaluating and interpreting the phenomenally given “data of sense”, in Cassirer’s opinion, can be made especially clear in the case of the “spatial organization” of reality which, to common sense, appears as one of its most immediate, non-mediated and non-symbolic features. He argues that relations of proximity and togetherness (Mit-und Beieinander), of here-, there- and between-ness, while apparently as independent of an interpreting observer as the given phenomena among which they hold, are recognized, upon reflection, to be intelligible only as rather complex and mediated products of symbolic representation. In attributing a certain size, position, or distance to any kind of object, we are not asserting “properties” of sense-data, but relations holding for the phenomena considered. Cassirer takes it as a secured result of both epistemological and psychological analyses of space that any organization “within” it does presuppose types of “judgments” and “evaluations” of the perceptually given data of sense. In support of this contention, let us briefly review two philosophical sample-analyses of space, characteristic of rationalist and empiricist types of analysis.