Parkhomenko, R. N. Ernst Cassirer’s Verbal Reality

Abstract: Cassirer develops his own concept of the philosophy of language in the first four chapters of the first volume of his ‘Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’. There he successively views the functioning of the language at the stage of sensual and emotional expression and offers a definition of language at the initial stage of the development of the Russian society as an expression of the movement. Cassirer refers to psychological and esthetical researches carried out by J. Engel already in the 19th century as well as Wundt’s ‘Language’. The concept is based on the idea that the initial movement and the feeling of the movement create the circle of terms defining the content of consciousness and consciousness, in its turn, is only a sum of ‘connections’ and states. In addition, Cassirer appeals to German Kogen’s ideas who also viewed the movement and the feeling of the movement as the element and the main factor in the creation and development of human consciousness. The research methodology is based on the analysis of Ernst Cassirer’s works and critical literature about Cassirer. The author has been carrying out the aforesaid analysis for over 10 years. The author of the article shows that Cassirer reconstructs the evolution of the term ‘language’ from the mimic and analogous stage through the stage of symbolic expression to the language of terms and conceptual thinking up to the abstract forms of the modern scientific language. Due to the fact that Cassirer ‘breaks’ the integral universal of human culture into a number of autonomous spheres including language, he constantly compares language with myth, religion, art and science in order to clarify the role and place of language among all other phenomena of human culture.

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