EHESS

Ernst Cassirer and Claude Lévi-Strauss: Two Approaches to the Study of Myth
Author(s): Roger Silverstone
Source: Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 21e Année, No. 41 (Jan. - Jun., 1976), pp.
25-36
Published by: EHESS
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30124111 .
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Arch. Sc. soc. des Rel., 41, 1976, 25 - 36.
Roger SILVERSTONE

ERNST CASSIRER AND CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS

Two Approaches to the Study of Myth

Cet article confronte la th6orie du mythe d'Ernst Cassirer

d celle de Claude Livi-Strauss. Il cherche d ddmontrer que,
en dipit de leurs preoccupations diffdrentes, le philosophe
s'intdressant au mythe en tant qu'aspect de l'activit6 de la
pens6e humaine et I'anthropologue voyant dans les mythes
un aspect de la pensde sur l'activit6 humaine se rencontrent
sur plusieurs points. En particulier, cette etude comparative
fait ressortir l'uniti qui leur sert c tous deux de point de ddpart
et qui permet au philosophe de construire l'homme et c
l'anthropologue de le diss~quer.

The study of myth for both Cassirer and LEvi-Strauss is a key to the
understanding of man and his culture and for both myth is symbolic.
It mediates in the space between mind and reality, between the I and the
experienced world. Both seek to explore and define this space.
But if the space is the same for both, then their routes are different,
sometimes crossing, sometimes diverging, predominantly moving in opposite
directions. Above all this is a result of their different ambitions; one man
is more of a philosopher than an anthropologist, the other more of an
anthropologist than a philosopher. Cassirer is concerned with man's mind,
the universal spirit from which he starts and where, via its cultural
manifestations, he hopes to finish. He follows the clearly spiral path
defined by the dialectic. Levi-Strauss's objective is also the mind of man
and also its universality, but he begins firmly in the empirical world,
with cultures not culture, and his path is neither so elegant, so simple or
indeed so probable. Within the basic mind-symbol-reality structure
Cassirer seeks the dynamics that depend on the activity of mind and
which include reality, Levi-Strauss the forms that mind has already
created and which might lead to its understanding. While the one stresses
process, the other stresses form, and while one stresses affective power,
the other stresses rational intellect. However these oppositions are by no
means perfect; it is a question of emphasis only, and the purpose of
comparing them is not just to reveal their differences and similarities,
but also in doing that, to throw some further light on their common object.

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Cassirer's critical philosophy is grounded firmly in what he takes to

be the failure of both empiricism and idealism adequately to connect the
spiritual function with the sensory material. The former, he suggests,
posits a concept of the given particular but not the universal, while the
latter acknowledges both but fails to designate the medium through which
they can be represented. He goes on to say that if "we start not with
abstract postulates but from the concrete basic form of spiritual life, this
dualistic antithesis is resolved. The illusion of an original division between
the intelligible and the sensuous, between "idea" and "phenomenon"
vanishes. True, we still remain in a world of "images" but these are not
images which reproduce a self-subsistent world of "things"; they are
image-worlds whose principle and origin are to be sought in the autono-
mous creation of the spirit. Through them alone we see what we call
"reality" and in them alone we possess it: for the highest objective truth
that is accessible to the spirit is ultimately the form of its own activity"
(Cassirer, 1953, pp. 110-111, my italics).
The most profound feature of Cassirer's philosophy is the determination
of the image worlds, the self-contained, dynamic and potent unities that
both define the essence of man and are defined by him. These image
worlds, expressed in the symbolic forms of language, myth, religion, art and
science, define and create their own reality. Within them is expressed
the power generated by the working of man's imagination, a power that
incorporates not just the vitality of the rational but also a moral and
aesthetic vitality. It is this power and the tensions that are generated by
and within it that lies at the heart of what Cassirer takes to be the
symbolic.
Cassirer's thought, then, proceeds from the initial postulate of the
functional unity of man, the unity of function inherent in the world of
his symbolic creations, to the various symbolic forms which express that
world. His method follows accordingly: to seek the formal and functional
unity underlying these apparently diverse symbolisms. And it is in the
establishment of this relationship that perhaps the two theories are
closest. For when Levi-Strauss writes in Structural Anthropology of the
virtues of comparative structural analysis he says: "We shall be in a
position to understand basic similarities between forms of social life,
such as language, art, law and religion that on the surface seem to differ
greatly. At the same time, we shall have the hope of overcoming the
opposition between the collective nature of culture and its manifestations
in the individual, since the so-called "collective consciousness" would in
the final analysis, become no more than the expression, on the level of
individual thought and behaviour, of certain time and space modalities
of the universal laws, which make up the unconscious activity of the
mind" (Levi-Strauss, 1968, p. 65). However, for Levi-Strauss, this is more
hope than promise and this is so because he nails his flag firmly to the
mast of ethnology and to the prior study of the empirical ethnological
facts. In the Raw and the Cooked he defines the relationship of philosopher
to ethnologist, as he sees it, precisely: "Instead of assuming a universal
form of human understanding, he (the ethnologist) prefers to study
empirically collective forms of understanding, whose properties have been
solidified, as it were, and are revealed to him in countless concrete
representational systems" (Levi-Strauss, 1969, p. 11). And the ethnologist
deliberately chooses the most divergent systems so that the "methodological
rules he will have to evolve in order to translate these terms of his own
system and vice versa will reveal a pattern of basic and universal laws"

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 THE STUDY OF MYTH

(ibid.). So, it might be possible to say that for Levi-Strauss the symbol is
cultural whereas for Cassirer the reverse is true, culture is symbolic.
The paradox that, among others, we shall come to is that while
Cassirer, keeping close to the constancy of mind and searching for man's
unity, finds that unity forever and profoundly changing, L6vi-Strauss,
clinging to the variations in culture seeks a unity of mind that the ravages
of history can never finally destroy. Cassirer's unity is dynamic and
creative and is to be found in the symbolic itself: Ldvi-Strauss's unity is
ultimately static and is to be found in the physiological determinants of
man's thought.
Cassirer, therefore, defines the space for the symbolic within which
myth is to be placed. In so doing he provides an enabling philosophy
for the work of Levi-Strauss which both highlights it and indicates its
limits. The difference between the two approaches to myth is then only
superficially a product of the philosophy-ethnology opposition which
defines the context of their work. Beneath this there lie two separate
though interdependent, targets: Cassirer seeks the mind which creates
the myth, the spirit in all its power: Levi-Strauss seeks the message in
all its communicated complexity. The unitary power of mind in the one
opposes the tension of meaning and object in the other.
In Totemism and in The Savage Mind Levi-Strauss is especially
concerned to de-institutionalize totemism, to reduce its specificity and to
incorporate it into a system of thought, in which it is, perhaps, no more
than the most obvious example (LEvi-Strauss, 1969a, passim; 1966b, p. 76).
But this system of thought is not introspective, it does not exist primarily
to commune with itself in an ideal world of mind, nor, primarily, to
determine its nature. This system of primitive (1) thought exists as the
product of the necessity in man to create order around him. It exists
therefore as the main tool of conversion for man both in his attempt to
incorporate nature into culture and to make sense of the various levels
or codes that make up that culture (Levi-Strauss, 1966b, p. 90). As such
its primary orientation is to the sensible world. "Myths and rites are far
from being, as has often been held, the product of men's "myth-making
faculty", turning its back on reality. Their principle value is indeed to
preserve until the present time the remains of methods of observation and
reflection which were (and no doubt still are) precisely adapted to
discoveries of a certain type: those which nature authorised from the
starting point of a specialised organisation and exploitation of the sensible
world in sensible terms" (Levi-Strauss, ibid., p. 16) (2).
Such a statement would rightly be construed as a rejection of the type
of approach to myth of which Cassirer is perhaps the supreme example
- Cohen describes it as within "the worst tradition of essentialism"
(Cohen, 1969, p. 339), but such opposition does not always in fact take
Levi-Strauss very far from the type of thought he criticises. Above all in
his description of the process at work in the totemic operator he aligns
himself very closely to Cassirer's description of the symbolic function, for
example, later in The Savage Mind he writes of this process in terms of
"...a sort of conceptual apparatus which filters unity through multiplicity,

(1) Levi-Strauss uses the term primitive to describe prescientific thought. In this
sense it equates very well with Cassirer's attribute mythical. The ramifications of these
categorisations should become clearer in the course of the paper.
(2) In a footnote the anonymous translators of The Savage Mind mention that
this is in fact a reference to Bergson and his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

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multiplicity through unity, diversity through identity, identity through

diversity" (Levi-Strauss, 1966b, p. 153), and his own structural approach
to myth is limited, as he freely admits (L6vi-Strauss, 1968, pp. 82-83) by
"an empirical richness and diversity that will always transcend our efforts
at observation and description". So it follows that the unity which he
posits, both in myth and in his analysis of myth, is exactly that which
Cassirer describes, the unity produced in and by the imagination (Levi-
Strauss, 1969b, p. 5).
Primitive thought is, above all, concrete, and for L6vi-Strauss that
means primarily that the elements which it uses to construct itself are
taken from whatever is available to experience, especially from nature.
The mythical bricoleur, faced with a nature that is apparently systematic
(the diversity of species) and also a previous set of equally concrete
concepts, constructs a new building with the bricks of the old. "The
mistake was to think that natural phenomena are what myth seeks to
explain, when they are rather the medium through which myths try to
explain facts which are themselves not of a natural but a logical order"
(L6vi-Strauss, 1966b, p. 95). The hypothetical myth-maker uses nature
because it is useful, and this apparent tautology is explained by the fact
that the species themselves are posed in a logical position half way
between the extremes of classification - the categorical and the singular -
and so it is the species which, standing as they do between these two forms,
allow the passage from "the unity of a multiplicity to the diversity of a
unity" (ibid., p. 136).
Two further aspects of primitive thought follow from this. Firstly,
the bricoleur is preconstrained both in his choice of elements and the
manner in which they can use them. The concreteness of the sign (the
element) implies the incorporation by it of a "certain amount of human
culture" (Levi-Strauss, 1966b, p. 20); in this they are opposed to concepts
which can be purely ideal. Signs therefore, are agents of recognition
whereas concepts are agents of discovery. Secondly, the act of recognition
implies the act of classification and that, in turn, must be presented in
terms of difference. The homology that the primitive mind recognises
between his culture and nature is not one of identity but of an identity
of difference (ibid., p. 115). The prime energy for classification is not an
emotional bond between the human and the animal world, or a justification
of the former through the latter, but a logical energy, whose sole object
is understanding the differences both between nature and culture and
within man's own socio-cultural reality. "The mythical system and the
modes of representation it employs serve to establish homologies between
natural and social conditions or, more accurately, it makes it possible
to equate significant contrasts found on different planes: the geographical,
meteorological, zoological, botanical, technical, economic, social, ritual,
religious and philosophical" (ibid., p. 93).
It follows too that the sign and the system of signification which
contains it consists in what may be called an "intentional dialectic ".
Dialectic, because the totemic ambition is to make opposition constructive
of integration, as opposed to destructive of it (Levi-Strauss, 1969a, p. 161),
and intentional, firstly because the links are made by and through the
mind (ibid., p. 163) but also because the process of making these links
involves the creation of one logic by means of another. However this
intentionality is qualified; in the first instance (ibid., pp. 10-11) because
the initial elements in the system might have been selected arbitrarily,
but more, because as time (history) progresses, the intentionality of the

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primary structure is continually compressed and obscured by the addition

of new elements (Levi-Strauss, 1966b, pp. 156-160). LEvi-Strauss's analogy
for this is the growth of a tree. The initial structure near the trunk is
clear and intelligible, but as the three grows, in its branching, it produces
new and different logics increasingly less related, although still connected,
to the main structure.
So primitive thought is profoundly logical (3). The transcendence
of the contrast between the tangible and the intelligible, expressed in the
sign, is above all a rational transcendence, and it is this logic which
both determines the system, its nature and its truth. The truth of myth
"consists in logical relations which are devoid of content or, more precisely,
whose invariant properties exhaust their operative value since comparable
relations can be established among the elements of a large number of
different contrasts" (Levi-Strauss, 1969b, p. 240). The suggestion that this
process is a dynamic one, that the thinking process should be treated as
taking place in the myths (rather than in the mind of man) is a close as
he comes to the kind of dynamic which Cassirer describes, but, of course,
transplanted to a new and more accessible reality.
It is, in a sense, because Cassirer maintains his emphasis on the
mind, despite or because of its inaccessibility, that his myth, his primitive
thought, seems above all to be expressed in an active rather than a passive
mode. As can now be seen this is very much true to the a priori nature
of mind which is his starting point (Cassirer, 1955, p. 194), while for
Levi-Strauss mind is an a posteriori construction, if it is to be constructed
at all. Therefore whereas Levi-Strauss sees the concrete nature of myth
in the objectivity of its contents, in their sensed reality, Cassirer sees
it in the relation that the mind postulates between the object and its
meaning. "The mythical world (...) is concrete because in it the two
factors, thing and signification, are undifferentiated, because they merge,
grow together, concresce in an immediate unity (...) myth rises spiritually
above the world of things, but in the figures and images with which it
replaces the world it merely substitutes for things another form of
materiality and of bondage to things" (ibid., p. 24).
All manner of implications arise from this and from the general
principles of symbolic thought already described. Firstly, the concreteness
of relation directly implies a stress in myth on contiguity, not separation,
and hence the rejection by myth of a logic that is purely rational. The
reality that myth creates, as in the other symbolic forms, is peculiar to it
(Cassirer, 1955, p. 20), and this reality is linked directly with man's
activity - it is its product. For Cassirer, as we have seen, this activity is
symbolic, and as such, more comprehensive than the activity of reason.
"It is not mere meditation but action which constitutes the centre from
which man undertakes the spiritual organisation of reality" (ibid., p. 157).
Therefore the mind demands of myth, as myth demands of its own
object, a unity of life which denies the clarity and fixity of a true scientific
classification. In The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms he talks of myth
seeming "to roll up everything it touches into unity without distinction (...).
Things which come into contact with one another in a mythical sense -
whether this contact is taken as a spatial or temporal contiguity or as a

(3) As the context, I hope, makes clear, logic in this sense implies only the logic of a
systemic ordering, a logic which is defined by, and adequate for, a particular discourse
of thought - in this case the discourse of primitive thought. This logic is to be
distinguished from Aristotelian and "scientific" logic (see also below p. 31-32).

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similarity, however remote, or a membership in the same class or species -

have fundamentally ceased to'be a multiplicity; they have acquired a
substantial unity" (Cassirer, 1955, p. 63), and again in An Essay on Man
he writes: "Life (...) is felt as an unbroken continuous whole which does
not admit of any clean cut distinctions" (Cassirer, 1944, p. 81). The solidity
of relation extends to that of the part and the whole (Cassirer, 1955, p. 50),
and, paradoxically, it allows of great fluidity (ibid., p. 159. See also Cassirer,
1957, pp. 61-62), which only gradually lessens as the recognition of the
integrity of the self and then of the sign develops. And since the stress on
myth is on contiguity, it is precisely through this that relations which in
science would be seen in terms of cause and effect, are made. Myth lacks
the category of the ideal; there is no isolating abstraction. So when things
are seen to change, that change must be, and is, expressed in terms of
metamorphosis (Cassirer, 1955, p. 43ff). Above all, the stress is on fusion,
of man and animal, of sign and meaning, of object and belief, and it is
within the context of belief that myth finds itself. For Cassirer myth is,
above all, the territory of the sacred, whereas for Levi-Strauss if the
context is not the profane, at least it is the secular.
It is to Schelling that Cassirer looks for inspiration on the nature of
power and belief in myth, and in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms he
quotes him as saying: "It is not with things that man has to do in the
mythological process, it is powers arising within consciousness itself that
move him" (Cassirer, 1955, p. 8).
However, the introduction of the Sacred-Profane dichotomy, which
defines the space within which myth is to be found, and which generates
its driving force, is itself slightly problematical. That it should be the first
distinction made by the mind is possible, that it does lie at the centre
of what normally is taken to be primitive thought is probable, but the
question arises whether if, in proposing this distinction, mythic thought
does not exclude one part of man's experience from consideration. The
question is whether mythic thought is as inclusive and as extensive a form
of thought as Cassirer maintains it is, for if it is to include the world of
the profane, how is it to be incorporated, but if it is to exclude it, as it
seems, then what form does thought take that has the profane as its
object ? One can only wonder.
Nevertheless it is clear that the images in myth do have a power
and that this power is essentially sacred; and it is consistent that the
power thus developed should have its foundation in the tension expressed
through the symbolic form and through the sign itself. Hence, to the
question of the origin of religious excitement, to which Durkheim addresses
himself, and which Levi-Strauss either inverts or neutralises, the answer
is neither society, nor nature, but in their juxtaposition. Religious
consciousness precedes the feeling for community (Cassirer, 1955, p. 177),
and the language of myth is essentially a powerful mediation, the result
of the dialectic of the human and the natural (ibid., pp. 192-193).
Hence the problem that Cassirer identifies in myth is not that of its
material content "but the intensity with which it is experienced, with
which it is believed - as only something endowed with objective reality
can be believed" (Cassirer, 1955, p. 5). He goes on to say: "This basic fact
of mythical consciousness suffices to frustrate any attempt to seek its
ultimate source in invention - whether poetic or philosophical" (ibid.).
Accordingly his attention is drawn to the specific nature of space, time
and number, and to their implication. The intuition of space in myth
grows directly from the primary sacred and profane dichotomy: "All the
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 THE STUDY OF MYTH

relations of mythical space rests ultimately on this original identity: they

go back not to similarity of efficacy, nor to a dynamic law, but to an
original identity of essence" (ibid., p. 89). If space is essentially sacred
and at first a static quality (ibid., p. 104), then time is absolute (ibid., p. 106)
and number is both powerful and magical (ibid., p. 143). All these "strive"
in their various ways to escape from their fixedness in the world of sense
perception towards the freedom of the universal view. Cassirer traces
this progress and its effects on the content of mythico-religious belief.
It is what he calls "the odyssey of the pure consciousness of God" (ibid.,
p. 9), and the movement towards it seems to parallel the development of
the primitive's objective involvement with the world around him (ibid.,
p. 157).
The focal point of the comparison between Cassirer and Levi-Strauss
must revolve around this affectivity-affective neutrality emphasis which
should by now be clear. The order that Levi-Strauss sees in myth is
rational order, the order that Cassirer sees is order in thought, in action
and in the apprehension of visible, tangible and audible appearances
(Cassirer, 1944, p. 168); the unity of myth is of feeling and not of logical
rules (ibid., p. 81). Elsewhere he asks whether it is not a false rationa-
lisation to attempt to understand myth through its form of thought.
"... For nowhere in myth do we find a passive contemplation of things;
here all contemplation starts from an attitude, an act of the feeling and
will" (Cassirer, 1955, p. 69). Its significance can only be found within the
feeling of the dynamic of life behind the objective world of forms.
Against this Levi-Strauss stands very clearly, and the context of his
opposition is the attempt to come to terms first of all with the mythical
world rather than the mythical mind and hence the need to translate
mythical conceptions in one way or another into our forms of rationality.
While he recognises that myth and magic have affectivity as their source
(Levi-Strauss, 1968, p. 182), he insists that myth is essentially intellectual
(ibid., p. 184). Impulses and emotions are never causes, but only results.
Causes "can be sought only in the organism, which is the exclusive
concern of biology, or in the intellectual which is the sole way offered to
psychology, and to anthropology as well" (Levi-Strauss, 1969a, p. 142).
The demands of what he takes to be his object, the need, as he sees it, for
a material grounding for anthropology, and the failure of Durkheim and
Mauss in Primitive Classification (Durkheim and Mauss, 1963, p. 88) to
transcend the implications of their theory, all conspire to produce the
following axiom; "As affectivity is the most obscure side of man, there
has been the constant temptation to resort to it, forgetting that what is
refractory to explanaion is ipso faco unsuitable for use in explanation. A
datum is not primary because it is incomprehensible.>> (Levi-Strauss, 1969a,
p. 140).
This differing emphasis on affectivity leads directly to very different
attitudes towards the transcendance of myth by the "purer" forms that
follow, towards the relation of myth to science and to religion and towards
different ideas of the nature of man's "progress". There are certain
problems attached to both accounts.
Myth explodes and splinters, according to Cassirer, when consciousness
of the sign dawns. Art, religion and science follow their various and
separate paths towards the universal, but what unites them in their
awareness of the sign is their increasingly rational and logical character,
progressively denying the logic of feeling which conditioned the forms of
mythic thought. His evidence for a logic of feeling is used in his argument
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against the pre-logicality hypothesis of Levy-Bruhl (Cassirer, 1944, p. 79ff),

but as Bidney points out, "... the disparity between mythical and logical
thought is much greater in Cassirer's own theory of mental and cultural
development than it is in Levy-Bruhl's work" (Bidney, 1949, p. 526) and
this is a direct result of Cassirer's preoccupation with man's progress.
While the basic functioning of symbolic thought is not supposed to change,
there are profound and continuous developments which seem to extend
beyond just the content of thought, and in the ensuing process of self-
reflexity, to alter the nature of the symbolic itself. When myth is described
in the second volume of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer, 1955,
p. 36ff) it is both implicitly and explicitly done so in relation to science,
and always negatively. Science embodies the purity of relation, and the
evidence for a constant world for ever denied to myth (Cassirer, 1944,
p. 207). Even the gradual development from myth to religion is seen as
an advance, although of a different order.
On the other hand Levi-Strauss seems to waver. Certainly he decides
in favour of the constancy of mind; the rationality in myth is of the same
order and leads quite naturally to the rationality of science: "... the diffe-
rence lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature
of the things to which it is applied (...) man has always been thinking
equally well" (Levi-Strauss, 1968, p. 230). But once again the separation of
content and form is not entirely clear. Towards the end of From Honey
to Ashes, for example, he speaks of myth breaking clear from the concrete
restrictions within which it is normally to be found and reaching "a point
where mythic thought transcends itself and, going beyond images retaining
some relationship with concrete experience, operates in a world of concepts
which have been released from any such obligation and combine with each
other in free association" (Levi-Strauss, 1973, p. 473). For him too there is
a boundary between myth and philosophy-science, and the question which
is posed, it would seem, is to what extent such a transformation can be as
superficial as it needs to be for the consistency of his argument.
Therefore, when in The Savage Mind (Levi-Strauss, 1966b, p. 269) he
compares myth and science once again, one might prefer to stress the
differences as well as the similarities. "Certainly the properties to which
the savage mind has access are not the same as those which have
commanded the attention of scientists. The physical world is approached
from opposite ends in the two cases: one is supremely concrete, the other
supremely abstract; one proceeds from the angle of sensible qualities and
the other from that of formal properties." However there is another
reason for referring to this passage, for it seems that not only is Levi-
Strauss describing the exact difference between myth and science, but that
he is also, albeit implicitly, describing the exact difference between his
anthropological philosophy and Cassirer's philosophical anthropology. His
is concrete and treats the sensible, wherein it begins, Cassirer's is abstract
and begins with the formal properties of mind. While Levi-Strauss is
making myths, Cassirer is attempting to destroy them. And this final
justaposition has profound implications for L6vi-Strauss's structural-
semiotic enterprise.
When L6vi-Strauss speaks of his work as a mythology of mythology
(Levi-Strauss, 1969b, p. 6) it is important to take him seriously. There
are two senses in which this can be said to be true. Firstly, as has been
shown, his own analysis is essentially concrete, primarily treating the
myth itself as object and subsequently defining it within the cultural
context. The bases of his argument remain the existence of the unique

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 THE STUDY OF MYTH

texts, the individual myths, the specific image-events. Secondly, his own
thought deals with the products of other people's thought; he becomes a
twentieth century bricoleur, producing what might be described as a
meta-symbolic, a translation from one symbolic reality to another.
So Levi-Strauss is striving for the general structural principle, the
rules of ordering, without which no meaning is possible; from the specific
nonreversible time of the event (the myth in this case, but also speech,
or history (Levi-Strauss, 1968, pp. 209-210), the path leads to the specific
reversible time of the structural generalisation. The question which is
provoked, then, is to what extent it is possible to describe the uniqueness
of the event while also understanding it at the level of its structural
interrelatendness with other such events; to hold both in ones hand
simultaneously, as it were. Levi-Strauss identifies the problem, of course;
he calls it the uncertainty principle of anthropology (Levi-Strauss, 1966a,
p. 36), but its recognition has not produced any clear solution, only different
formulations of it. (Levi-Strauss, 1960, p. 3ff; 1968, pp. 209-210, 280,
328-333). All of these present his reluctance to abandon the empirical
reality, to abandon his hold on the unique in favour of a chance of
approaching the purity of structure which he continually hints at and in
a sense demands - and to which Cassirer addresses himself directly (4).
In the last few pages of the second volume of The Philosophy of
Symbolic Forms Cassirer traces the development of the symbolic from
myth to religion, and within religion itself (Cassirer, 1955, p. 254). It
consists, essentially, in a progressive emancipation of the sign or symbol
from its sensuous grounding, in the gradual awakening of the religious
mind to this separate existence, and this emancipation involves the
development of the meaning-context of the sign from the specific event
via analogy towards the universal. However, the religious symbol always
relates to the specificity of the event; there is a tangible element, a
portion of reality within it not only which it cannot escape, but which
provides the force for its belief. The image is the event, and the event
makes it real; but the significance of the image depends on its relevance
within the specific belief structure of the religion, its particular univer-
sality. However image and meaning, content and form, are never at peace
with each other. Cassirer refers to the Platonic observation that in the
world of theoretical cognition "the division of the one into the many and
the return of the many to the one has neither beginning nor end but
always was and is and will be an 'immortal and never ageing element' of
of our thought and discourse" (Cassirer, 1955, p. 260). He sees the same
lack of equilibrium present in religion, and he summarizes the situation
thus: "In the image myth sees a fragment of substantial reality, a part of
the material world itself, endowed with equal or higher powers than this
world. From this first magical view religion strives towards a progressively
purer spiritualisation. And yet, again and again, it is carried back to
a point at which the question of its truth and meaning content shifts
into the question of the reality of its objects, at which it faces the problem
of 'existence' in all its harshness. It is only the aesthetic consciousness
that leaves this problem truly behind it" (ibid., p. 261).
Levi-Strauss recognises a similar tension in myth when he writes of
"the dual nature of mythological thought, which coincides with its object
by forming a homologous image of it but never succeeds in blending with
it, since thought and object operate on different levels" (Levi-Strauss,

(4) Cassirer, of course, in so doing, rejects his hold on the unique.

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ARCHIVES DE SCIENCES SOCIALES DES RELIGIONS

1969b, p. 6, my italics). If he recognises this impossibility in myth then it

must exist also in his own thought, for not only does that possess the same
links with the concrete as does myth, but one can place it in the same
formal position in relation to myth as Cassirer places religion. Both
recognise the existence and integrity of the sign, both seek to determine
and understand the nature of the signs upon whitch they both depend,
and both are unable, for precisely the same reasons, to reject the image
in favour of the pure forms of art or, indeed, of science.
Just before his death in 1945 Cassirer wrote an article for the first
volume of Word on "Structuralism in Modern Linguistics". In it he
examined the nature of the legacy that nineteenth century thought
provided for the linguistics of his own age. He was concerned to identify
a universal trend in thought of which linguistics was only a particular
example: "What I wished to make clear in this paper is the fact that
structuralism is no isolated phenomenon; it is rather the expression of a
general tendency of thought that, in these last decades has become more
and more prominent in almost all fields of scientific research" (Cassirer,
1945, p. 120). There is in this a final justification for placing the two
men together. The debt to which each owes to the developments in lin-
guistics is clear: Cassirer looks to von Humboldt, the founder of synchronic
linguistics, and Levi-Strauss to de Saussure and Jakobson, major pioneers
within that tradition. The work of both partakes of the tradition that
the one identifies.

So it seems fair to say that an understanding of the work of Levi-

Strauss is increased when placed alongside that of Cassirer, and that this
is most often true with regard to what otherwise might be considered as
L6vi-Strauss's more obscure excursions into his private metaphysics. There
is a passage in The Savage Mind (Levi-Strauss, 1966b, p. 131), which can
only be fully understood, I would argue, within the context of Cassirer's
neo-Kantian philosophy: "All that I claim to have shown so far is,
therefore, that the dialectic of superstructures, like that of language,
consists in setting up constitutive units (which for this purpose have to
be defined unequivocally, that is by contrasting them in pairs) so as to be
able by means of them to elaborate a system which plays the part of a
synthesising operator between ideas and facts thereby turning the latter
into signs. The mind thus passes from empirical diversity to conceptual
simplicity and then from conceptual simplicity to meaningful synthesis."
The totemic operator, one element in this dialectical superstructure, is
seen as identical in its functioning to that of the symbolic function as
described by Cassirer.
Within this broad and essential unity of thought the differences can
be described, predominantly, at least, to the different aims that each
theorist sets himself. Ashley-Montague, writing about Cassirer exclusively,
picks up one contrast: "Cassirer's approach to mythology is that of the
neo-Kantian phenomenologist; he is not interested in mythology as such
but in the processes of consciousness which lead to the creation of myth"
(Ashley-Montague, 1949, p. 367). One might say then, with some justifi-
cation, that Cassirer is interested in myth as an aspect of the practice of
human thought, while Levi-Strauss is interested in myths as an aspect of
thought on human practice.
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 THE STUDY OF MYTH

It follows then that in Levi-Strauss communication and in Cassirer,

the symbolic function, are aspects of the same thing. Both are productive
of signs and symbols as a result of the mediation between the I and the
world, between image and meaning, or more specifically between nature
and culture. The difference is not one of essence, as has been shown,
but of the demands of the particular analysis. So while it might be said
that Levi-Strauss operationalises Cassirer's philosophy, it is precisely in
the demands of such an operationalisation that one can see its limits.
Above all he is restricted to what can be analysed and tested; he seeks
both a grounding for the myths in the society which produces them and
a logical coherence within them. These demands restrict the scope of
his attention: affectivity is rationalised, his analyses are potentially
endless (Levi-Strauss, 1969b, p. 5). But the price he pays for an order
where there was no order before (5) is what Ricoeur calls "un squelette"
(Ricoeur, 1962, p. 617).
The dynamic richness in myth of which Cassirer's philosophy provides
just a glimpse is, in the last resort, denied to Levi-Strauss; but the
fruitfulness of their juxtaposition lies precisely in the unity which serves
as a starting point for both and which lets the philosopher construct man
and the anthropologist to dissect him.
Roger SILVERSTONE
Bedford College
University of London

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ASHLEY-MONTAGUE (M.F.) 1949 : 4 Cassirer on Mythological Thinking >, in

P.A. SCHILPP(ed.), The Philosophy of Ernst
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BIDNEY (David) 1949 : < On the Philosophical Anthropology of Ernst
Cassirer and Its Relation to the History of
Anthropological Thought >, in P.A. SCHILPP,
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CASSIRER
(Ernst) 1944 : An Essay on Man. New Haven, Yale University
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1945 : < Structuralism in Modern Linguistics >, Word,
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1946 : Language and Myth. New York, Harper and
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(5) On the other hand attention is drawnto the conclusionwhich Peter Cawsmakes
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ARCHIVES DE SCIENCES SOCIALES DES RELIGIONS

CAWS (Peter) 1970 : < What is Structuralism? >3, in E.N. HAYES,

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