© Idealistic Studies. Volume 49, Issue 3 (Fall 2019). ISSN 0046-8541. pp. 259–284 DOI: 10.5840/idstudies20191023105 ORGANIC HARMONY AND ERNST CASSIRER’S PLURALISM Shuchen Xiang Abstract: This article argues that Cassirer’s thinking about the relation- ship between the different symbolic forms is best elucidated via the paradigm of “organic harmony.” Although Cassirer did not use the term himself, the harmonious cooperation between the parts found in the organic world provided him with a welcome alternative to traditional accounts of order (i.e., identity or hierarchy). This article gives three examples of “organic harmony” from which Cassirer drew inspiration: Goethe’s idealistic morphology, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s account of language, and Herder’s account of history. Through “organic harmony” we can make better sense of and better articulate the pluralism of Cas- sirer’s PSF. Finally, this article shows how the motif of organic harmony is the normative moment in Cassirer’s own challenge to twentieth-century fascism and argues that the Cassirerian emphasis on fnding a coherence which does justice to the uniqueness of particulars—harmony—is an ethical injunction relevant for our times. Introduction Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) is widely regarded as one of the foremost in- tellectual historians of the twentieth century (Friedman 2005: 71), and the derivation of his own philosophy of the symbolic forms (henceforth “PSF”) is inextricable from his encyclopaedic knowledge of European intellectual history (Krois 1987: ix; Morgenthau 1947: 142). Famously, he sought to fnd “harmony in contrariety” among the variety of the “symbolic forms” (Transcendental conditions of meaning and experience: myth, language, science, art, history, law, technology, amongst others). In Cassirer’s view, the story of European intellectual history has been the replacement of the concept of substance with the concept of function (explained below). This change of paradigm led to the humanism of the Goethezeit as embodied by Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Herder, all of whom embraced plural- ism (defned below). For Cassirer, the worldview of these three fgures is fundamentally indebted to Leibniz (Cassirer 1961: 30, 40) who, according to Cassirer, was the father of the organic conception between part and the whole. This article argues that the thought of all four fgures demonstrate the