Ernst Cassirer, * 28. Juli 1874 in Breslau; † 13. April 1945 in New York,

Foto gemeinfrei (Wikipedia)

Politically and in terms of social behaviour, we are extremely unsettled today. How did this come about?
Why are we losing faith in institutionally enshrined laws and constitutions? Can philosophy provide any answers to this?


At the invitation of Massimo Ferrari and Maja Soboleva, I have explored this topic in a contribution to a special issue on The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer.
It will be published in September 2026 as a special issue of the RUDN Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 3, 2026

Martina Sauer.
Ernst Cassirer. On the Foundations of (Social) Political Behaviour. A Contribution to the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The Arts.

Building on research into Cassirer since 2006, informed by the philosophy of art and the life sciences, I arrived at conclusions that prompted a re-examination of the question of what constitutes the function of the arts. For, according to Cassirer, these can be described not only as symbolically effective forms that create distance, but can also be identified as conditions enabling exchange amongst us humans. In this respect, they are the symbolic forms—as this paper argues—that can be regarded as fundamental to the (socio)political development of humankind. Since Cassirer himself did not realise the planned fourth volume on the philosophy of symbolic forms from the 1920s concerning the function of the arts, but instead addressed aspects of this in several writings from the 1940s, in this paper I have sought to address this gap by following the suggestion formulated in the subtitle of the German edition of his final work, *On the Myth of the State* (1945), and to highlight the foundations of political behaviour.