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IN A FRAGMENT, "The Concept of the Symbol: Metaphysics of the Symbolic," left among Ernst Cassirer's unpublished papers, Cassirer claims: "there is no 'being' of any kind except by virtue of some particular energy ('nature,' for example, only by virtue of artistic, religious, or scientific energy) and without our taking this relation into account, the concept of 'being' would be completely empty for us."1 The apprehension of what is, for Cassirer, requires the human power to form experience through the symbol. Man is the animal symbolicum who lives and thinks within the circle of human culture. Human being and being as such require the symbolic forms of culture in order for us to have knowledge of them. Cassirer states: "Under a 'symbolic form' should be understood each energy of spirit [Energie des Geistes] through which a spiritual content or meaning is connected with a concrete sensory sign and is internally adapted to this sign."2
Myth and religion, language, art, history, and science, as well as other areas of culture, are ways of forming through symbols the energy of Geist.'' There is not, for Cassirer, a literal interpretation of the world and a symbolic one. All of human experience is symbolic. All perception of the object is symbolically charged; there is no sensory grasp of the object that does not at the same moment stand in relation to an intellectual or spiritual structure. Cassirer calls this immediate bond between the sensory and the non-sensory, "symbolic pregnance." He states, "By symbolic pregnance [symbolische Prägnanz] we mean the way in which a perception as a sensory experience contains at the same time a certain nonintuitive meaning which it immediately and concretely represents."4
Cassirer offers a phenomenological thought experiment as a demonstration of the fact that the being of any object and its nature depend upon the manner in which it is apprehended. He asks the reader to consider a Linienzug, a graph-like line drawing. We may first grasp the line in terms of its physiognomic character, its dynamic rise and fall. It may glide along in part and then appear to be broken off and jagged. We may move from our apprehension of these perceptions and feeling-characteristics of the line to grasping it as a mathematical structure,...