I lifted this out of an otherwise boring review of some kind of art exhibit.
- In the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Ernst Cassirer asserts that art is essentially a manifestation of myth. It is a fundamental “symbolic form†that both responds to and creates our perceptions of the world. But unlike language, which similarly structures cognition, myth is rooted neither in intellect nor discourse, and is overwhelmingly image-based. It is an emotionally loaded, unmediated language of experience. There is no reflective separation of the real and the ideal within the mythic consciousness. Mythic images do not represent particular ‘things’, but in fact are those things. This literal, rather than representational, quality of myth suggests that art reveals a dynamism that gives meaning and intelligibility to the world in an experiential dimension.
I’m gonna look for more stuff about this Ernst Cassirer dude, because I like what I’m hearing so far. Here is an addition to that from a Hopkins University page on “Myth Theory & Criticism“:
- A characteristic Romantic and post-Romantic tendency in defining myth is the denial of euhemerism, the theory that myths can be explained historically or by identifying their special objects or motives. The resistance to such reductionism is perhaps strongest in the work of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, whose monumental Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is given over in its second volume (1925) to the proposition that “myth is a form of thought.” By this Cassirer means to insist that myth is a fundamental “symbolic form” that, like language, is a means of responding to, and hence creating, our world. But unlike language, or at least the language of philosophy, myth is nonintellectual, nondiscursive, typically imagistic. It is the primal, emotion-laden, unmediated “language” of experience. As a consequence, for mythic consciousness there is no reflective separation of the real and the ideal; the mythic “‘image’ does not represent the ‘thing’; it is the thing” (2:38). This literal, as opposed to representational, quality of myth suggests that literature that taps into the recesses of mythic consciousness will reveal in powerful fashion the “dynamic of the life feeling” (2:38), which gives meaning and intelligibility to our world.
And one clip from Encarta’s mythology entry:
- The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer refined the concepts of the intellectual-logical and the intuitive-imaginative aspects of myth in his discussion of the meanings of myth and of the social group. He allied himself with those who say that myth arises from the emotions. He stressed, however, that myth is not identical with the emotion from which it arises, but that it is the expression—the objectification—of the emotion. In this expression or objectification, the identity and basic values of the group are given an absolute meaning. Cassirer believed that myth and mythic modes of thinking form a deep substratum in the scientific, technological cultures of the West.
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