Voegelin sobre Cassirer

A review of Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State, Yale University Press, 1946.  From The Journal of Politics, Vol. 9, No. 3, August 1947, 445-447.

Posted May 13, 2008

Eric Voegelin

It is a melancholy task in more than one respect to review this posthumously published book of the late Ernst Cassirer.  It is a cause for regret that this should be the last time the admiration and gratitude of the reader will be aroused by a new revelation of Cassirer’s vast erudition; it is a cause for reflection that the generation which carried an important phase in modern philosophy, that is the neo-Kantian movement, is passing away; and the reading of the book causes a certain nostalgia for from its pages breathes a sureness of intellectual position, a genteelness of philosophizing, which is rather the mark of a passing age than of the author.  The task is melancholy also because this last book, perhaps more so than some of the earlier studies of Cassirer, leaves the reader with somewhat mixed feelings. The feeling of admiration for the great scholarship of the author will inevitably be mixed with a feeling of dismay caused by the evasion of fundamental issues.

The thesis of the book is based on a philosophy of history which is never made quite explicit.  Cassirer seems to assume that the human mind evolves historically from an early mythical phase towards an increasingly rational penetration of the world; the idols of the myth give way to reason and science. There is a strong touch of Comte in this view of history, a touch which the reader can find already in Cassirer’s Das Mythische Denken (Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen, Vol. II, 1925).  Now again Cassirer evokes the Comtean vision of crowning the edifice of science by a social science that will dispel the last shadows of the idola fori, the vision of a science that will bring to the study of society the same ways of reasoning, the same exactness of method that we find in physics and chemistry (p. 295).  These hopes of “Comte and of his pupils and adherents,” however, proved to be “premature.”  The sudden rise of political myths in the twentieth century proves that “politics is still far from being a positive science, let alone an exact science.”  Myth seems to be a permanently lurking force in the universe.  Culture can only arise when the “darkness of myth” is fought and overcome “by superior forces.”  When these forces, “intellectual, ethical and artistic,” lose their strength, chaos will break forth and the myth will again pervade “man’s cultural and social life” (p. 298).

This argument 

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