Show Notes
In this episode, we're venturing into the life and thought of Ernst Cassirer, the last humanist of the Enlightenment tradition. Cassirer is widely known today for his debate with Heidegger at Davos, in which Cassirer appeared as the old style philosopher against the new world signified by Heidegger's radical existentialism. And yet, the very fact that this debate was taking as symbolic of the broader trends in philosophy is in some sense a vindication of Cassirer, who believed that mankind was properly undertsood as animale symbolicum: the animal who symbolizes. Thinking in the Neo-Kantian tradition, Cassirer doesn't seem the symbolic world as approximating a "ready-made" world of objects, but as the conceptual organ for experiencing and thinking about the world at all. From this framework, Cassirer advances a remarkable notion: that language and myth are two shoots from the same stem, and if we want to understand language, we should look to the phases of mythic thinking. The central mystery we shall explore is how the "metaphorical transference" can take place, in which a sound comes to stand for an image, and the specific for the general category. At the root of all this, Cassirer raises an intriguing possibility: perhaps all of language originates in magical thinking and spiritual excitement.
More from The Nietzsche Podcast
Welcome to Becoming-Spooky! This is the first of three episodes in this special, seasonal series. Join me and deterritorialize the domains of sanity, the familiar and the human. Patrons will receive two additional episodes! The first half of the episode is my full reading of The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe. The second half includes my philosophical analysis, drawing on Lovecraft's essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, as well as my own impressions about the story.
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Neema Parvini is well known on Youtube for his channel, Academic Agent, and for his para-academic work at the Academic Agency. He discusses a broad range of topics in political philosophy, and does not shy away from any topic, from elite theory to Marxism, from Julius Evola to Guy Debord. We discuss how he moved from literary theory to political philosophy; what politics really demands and why it is not the same as theorizing, the "take economy", or expressions of individualism; we discuss the difference between Evola & Nietzsche; and we try to come to an understanding of how it is that politics as most people experience it and understand it is fake. Join us for what I believe to be a fascinating conversation about the illusions of politics, and hopefully a step in the direction of disillusioning ourselves. Neema's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@AcademicAgent Academic Agency: https://www.academic-agency.com/
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How did the bicameral mind emerge, and how did consciousness eventually take its place? Join me for an exploration of ancient Mesopotamian civilizations, in which Julian Jaynes traces the evidence over the centuries that suggest a disappearance of the gods and the emergence of subjectivity. The episode concludes with a brief tour of the shift to subjectivity found in the Old Testament.