This short (126 pp.) work was originally published by Cassirer in his native Germany. The English translation was undertaken by fellow philosopher--and in some ways his successor in the aspect of his project--Susanne K. Langer. The English-language edition was published in 1953. It's not a quick or easy read, but well worthwhile if the reader has an interest in the roots of myth, language, religion, and thought.
This is my first book by Cassirer. His titles, An Essay on Man (1943), The Myth of the State (1946), and Language and Myth were found on many book store shelves and The Myth of the State (which I've now started reading) was included on political theory "additional reading" bibliographies. But Cassirer wasn't taught in any class that I took, and I never got around to reading any of his work. But my curiosity was renewed when I read The Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy (2020), in which Cassirer comes across as the most establishment and the most traditional of the four thinkers discussed in that book. However, he also came across as the most sensible and accessible. The climax of the book was a "debate" between Cassirer and Martin Heidegger that was held in Davos (yes, that Davos) in 1929. Some thought Heidegger received the greater approval of those present, but I came away with s greater appreciation of Cassirer. (N.B. Heidegger remained in Germany in 1933 after the Nazis came to power and accepted a Nazi-approved position; Cassirer, who was Jewish, fled Germany that year for Britain and eventually came to the U.S., where he finished his career.)
Thus my taking up Language and Myth.
This is a dense book, not a long read, but neither is it a quick, easy read. In fact, in order to write this review, I went back and read it a second time. But the additional effort was worth the time spent.
Cassirer wields serious credentials as a scholar and as a thinker. His mastery of the literature of myth and religion from the nineteenth-century up to the time of his original publication in 1924 reveals his bona fides as a scholar. Many of the fellow scholars whose works he cites are unfamiliar to me (and were written in German), but a few, like Frazier, Tylor, and Max Muller, are familiar. Cassirer delves deeply into these sources in his attempt to understand the relationship between language, myth, religion, and later formal modes of thought (such as philosophy and science). That Cassirer relies on so many early explorations of mythology and religion makes me wonder how later developments in the field may alter the validity of his conclusions. In any event, these early European (and American?) scholars delved deeply and enthusiastically into other cultures and their ways, which is certainly one of the positive outcomes of the spread of Westerners around the world and their encounters with different civilizations and cultures. Cassirer seems quite well-acquainted with this pioneering literature. And what does he make of it?
In short, Cassirer argues that that language and myth share a common linage and that one doesn't pre-date the other. Myth and mythological (and magical) thinking pre-date later developments of what we've come to know as rational, logical thought. He spends the last chapter discussing metaphor as a key function of language. Put in the simplest terms, our logical-deductive, denotative language tends to abstraction and generalization, while our mythical, more metaphorical language tends toward specification. I come away with the feeling that Cassirer doesn't intend to crown one way of language and knowledge over the other, but he sees them as complementary. And don't be fooled by his sympathy for the archaic, the mythological, the metaphorical. This is a man who was a leading "neo-Kantian" and who wrote a book explaining Einstein's (then) new theory of relativity.
As I remarked above, I've just embarked on The Myth of the State, and I also have my eye on his An Essay on Man, both of which should take deeper into his project of "philosophical anthropology." After those two works, I'm looking forward to some of Susanne Langer's works. And, reading Myth and Language has me thinking about how his work compares to that of his peer, R.G. Collingwood, who served as a reader for an OUP book of essays dedicated to Cassirer, who was then living in the UK. So no doubt Collingwood had some acquaintance with Cassirer's project. Both of these thinkers were concerned with art and appreciated non-Western and archaic cultures and traditions. (And Collingwood made interesting observations about magic as well.) I also wonder how Cassirer compares to Owen Barfield, a younger contemporary concerned with the "evolution of thought" and origins and development of language. Finally, among our contemporaries, Iain McGilchrist cites Cassirer a few times in his masterwork, The Master and His Emissary, and I suspect that there are a good many more shared perspectives and potential influences than one might glean from McGilchrist's passing citations. (Perhaps McGilchrist's forthcoming book will shed some light on this topic.)
Cassirer is another thinker from the first half of the twentieth century and from Central Europe whose writing about philosophy, history, politics, religion, and art--and about their contemporary world--continues to fascinate me. A century ago they were dealing with the Great Influenza that ravaged the world in 1918-1919 while at the same time dealing with the destructiveness of the First World War and all the changes that it wrought. And it was a time of new mass media (radio and film), economic disruption (post-war and then the Great Depression), cultural change, and political extremism and violence. History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme, and the rhymes I hear make me nervous and therefore eager to take advantage of the insights and wisdom of those who dealt with similar challenges a century ago.
03.18.2021
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