The question I ask as I attempt to plumb some philosopher is ‘what is his doctrine, what is the mainspring, the assumption, the very clearly indisputable central fact for his thought. It might be something like evidence: how do I know what I know: It might be: what am I immediately aware of? This ‘pole star’ as it were, can be so powerful a true north that other ways of thinking languish, shunned as unpresentable. Ernst Cassirer whose ‘Essay on Man’ I have been reading does not consider some very important thinkers in his section on ‘Myth and Religion’. Who and why? Leaving the former aside for a later post (James, Otto, Bergson only to controvert him) the principle behind his exclusion, what Coleridge would have called ‘the understanding of his ignorance’ is to be discovered in his neo-Kantianism. Writing in the first book of his trilogy on ‘Symbolic Form’:
“Every genuine, basic spiritual function has one decisive feature in common with cognition: it is inherent in an original-formative force and not merely an imitative force. It does not express passively the mere fact that something is present but rather contains an independent energy of spirit through which the simple existence of the appearance assumes a determinate “signification”, a distinctive ideational content. This is as valid for art as it is for cognition; it is as valid for myth as for religion. They all live in distinctive image-worlds, which do not simply reflect an empirically given but which rather produce it in accordance with an independent principle.” (pg.7)
