Chapter 3 - Being in Time

Summary

Anne Pollok discusses the role of history, historiography, and historicity in Cassirer’s philosophy in this chapter. In contrast to the “objectively teleological” approaches to history offered by Leibniz or Hegel, Cassirer, on the one hand, does not assume an inherent teleology that is merely reflected in culture, but interprets history as a dynamic and progressive movement of the self-liberation of spirit that must be expressed and manifested by cultural means. Hence, the historian must actively engage with our cultural past as a means to elucidate our current standing and inform our future development. Contrary to Heidegger, on the other hand, Cassirer sees this process of self-liberation not as an existential struggle, but assumes that a proper relation to our history offers a valid answer to the demands of the present. Pollok hereby demonstrates that historical reconstruction elucidates the basic communal and intersubjective structure of symbol formation, thus transcending the limits of the historian’s time and elucidating the complex system of human symbolic formation in culture.