Symbolic Animals Roi Wagner 1. Ernst Cassirer entangles us in a symbolic web “The great thinkers who have defined man as an animal rationale,” writes Ernst Cassirer, “were not empiricists, nor did they ever intend to give an empirical account of human nature. By this definition they were expressing rather a fundamental moral imperative. Reason is a very inadequate term with which to comprehend the forms of man’s cultural life in all their richness and variety. But all these forms are symbolic forms. Hence, instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we should define him as animal symbolicum” (Cassirer 1974, 25-26). Cassirer wrote this statement in exile, in the early forties, at a time when what he saw as rationality had little to do with human existence. This was the statement of a philosopher whose hopes and faith – the enlightenment’s hopes and faith that had become anachronistic even before his own birth – had succumbed to the reality of World Wars. Rationality became too utopian an ideal. Symbolic forms were the next best thing. For Cassirer the function of symbolic forms was to mediate between man and reality. “Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system … No longer in a merely physical universe, man lives in a symbolic universe. Language, art, and religion are the parts of this universe. They are the varied threads which weave the symbolic net, the tangled web of human experience. All human progress in thought and experience refines upon and strengthens this net. No longer can man confront reality immediately, as it were, face to face. Physical reality seems to recede in proportion as man’s symbolic activity advances” (Cassirer 1974, 24-25, emphases mine). Cassirer’s model (my diagram)