Ernst Cassirer: How Do Ancient Empires Affect Me?

Upon one’s initial discovery, no matter the age or the era, ancient Greece and Rome are fascinating. The artistic and structural wonders they built are marveled at still to this day over two thousand years later. One simple question arises when additional thought is devoted to these civilizations. It is not how they accomplished such feats, why they did precisely what they did, or why the ultimately fell. These questions, although interesting, are far from simple. At a fundamental level, humans by nature tend to be subconsciously selfish whether one’s actions agree with it or oppose it. The underlying question is how do these ancient empires affect me? Through these two civilizations came the western world which then expanded into the vast
Of course, to a degree he indirectly continued the work Kant spent his life developing. Cassirer is known for his ability to integrate the mathematical, logical side of philosophy taught by his mentor Hermann Cohen with the idealism of Kant in a seamless fashion. Idealism is the practice of forming or pursuing ideals with a specific focus on those that are unrealistic. Cassirer’s ability to merge the logical thinking of rationalism with the abstract philosophy of Kant proved to be a talent few could rival as mentioned by industry experts in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. “The human being, for Cassirer, is not simply the rational animal, but the animal whose experience with and reaction to the world is governed by symbolic relations. Cassirer was a quintessential humanistic liberal, believing freedom of rational expression to be coextensive with liberation” (Jensen). By the 20th century, scientific theory was much more widely accepted than during the Age of Enlightenment. In a step away from strict rationalism, a line from Cassirer’s Substance and Function provides a perfect preview into his outlook on the world. “Science cannot be considered a collection of empirical facts. Science discovers no absolute qualities, but only qualities in relation to other qualities within a particular field, such as the concept of mass as the sum, of relations with respect to external impulses in motion, or energy as the momentary condition of a given physical system. Concrete sensuous impressions are only transformed into empirical objects by the determination of spatial and temporal form” (Cassirer). Among the many areas idealism affected was mid-20th century music as the notion of the soul returned to society in a secular