Ernst Cassirer

German neo-Kantian philosopher (1874–1945), best known for the Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (3 vols., 1923–29) and for the 1929 Davos disputation with Heidegger. For this wiki, Cassirer matters chiefly as the silent source of Merleau-Ponty's volant/flywheel figure — Saint Aubert's philological finding that MP's ~20 occurrences of volant (1951–1961) silently borrow Cassirer's Schwungrad from Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III (1929, p. 380), with explicit attribution only in MP's early manuscripts (PM-ms, Inéd, PbParole 116 + 128) and never in published texts.

Key Points

  • The Schwungrad/volant borrowing: Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III (Bruno Cassirer, 1929, p. 380) calls language "das Schwungrad gleichsam, das ihn [den Gedanken] in den Kreis ihrer eigenen unablässigen Bewegung aufnimmt und ihn mit sich fortreißt" — language as the flywheel that carries thought along in its own unceasing movement. MP appropriates this as the figure for the passive-active coupling of flesh, language, and intersubjectivity, and deploys it from 1951 (S(HoAdv) 290) to 1961 (PNPH 348, MP's last course).
  • Why MP suppresses the attribution: Saint Aubert flags but does not fully explain the silencing — possibly Cassirer's neo-Kantian distance from MP's project, possibly a matter of MP wanting the figure to do native work in his own carnal vocabulary.
  • The MP-Cassirer disagreement: MP's ontological-diplopia page records the late MP's polemical dismissal of Cassirer — at Course 9 of *In Praise of Philosophy* (1957–58, p. 166), MP rejects "Cassirer's response — to fall back on critical idealism" as exactly the move the diplopia forbids. So MP keeps the figure (Schwungrad) but rejects the framework (critical idealism).
  • Restriction of symbolism to the human: Cassirer's symbolic forms restrict the symbolic function to homo symbolicus. MP via Lorenz extends symbolism into ethology — see natural-symbolism — explicitly against Cassirer's restriction.
  • Davos 1929: Cassirer's most famous philosophical engagement (the Davos disputation with Heidegger) is the institutional context for his neo-Kantian position. MP's relation to Heidegger inherits some of the same fault lines but on his own terrain.

Role in the Wiki

Cassirer functions in two registers:

  1. As silent source of the volant/Schwungrad figure — a methodologically important case study in MP's tendency to absorb technical figures from neighboring traditions without explicit citation in published work.
  2. As polemical target — the neo-Kantian critical idealism MP's late ontology consciously refuses.

The two are not in tension: MP keeps Cassirer's figure (Schwungrad as flywheel of inertia) while rejecting the philosophical apparatus (critical idealism, restriction of symbolism to the human) within which Cassirer deploys it.

Connections

  • silent source for volant — MP's flywheel-of-inertia figure borrows Cassirer's Schwungrad without published attribution.
  • target of ontological-diplopia — MP rejects Cassirer's critical-idealist response to the crisis of the object-concept.
  • contrast for natural-symbolism — MP via Lorenz extends symbolism into ethology, against Cassirer's restriction to the human.
  • contemporary of edmund-husserl, martin-heidegger — the Davos 1929 disputation with Heidegger is the institutional anchor of his philosophical position.

Sources

  • saintaubert-2021-etre-et-chair-ii — Ch I § 1b, fn 2 p. 48 (the philological finding of the silent Cassirer borrowing); PM-ms [212]v(a)–213 and Inéd 43/406 (the only MP texts that cite Cassirer by name for the volant figure).
  • merleau-ponty-1970-in-praise-of-philosophy — Course 9 (1957–58), p. 166: MP's polemical dismissal of Cassirer's critical-idealist retreat.
  • Primary reference: Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen III: Phänomenologie der Erkenntnis (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1929), p. 380. French trans. by Claude Fronty (Éd. de Minuit, 1972) renders Schwungrad as volant.