The method and the spirit: a return to Kanton the threshold of the symbolic turn

Abstract

This paper aims to shed light on a precise moment in Cassirer's intellectual path: the transition from his Berlin phase to the beginning of his Hamburg phase. This is perhaps the most striking transition in Cassirer's work, because it represents the beginning of the most important and productive phase of his entire career, in which the author conceives his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. But here we are going to focus on some aspects of this transition that relate more to the consolidation of the Berlin phase and that place us precisely on the threshold of the project of the philosophy of symbolic forms. Thus, we intend to capture the moments immediately preceding what Cassirer refers to in the preface to the first volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as the expansion of the epistemological field from the critique of reason to the critique of culture. Thus, I intend to show the points at which the confluence of Cassirer's various research projects becomes evident and to point out the germination of his great work. In this way, we advocate assigning Cassirer's last work in the Berlin period, Kant - Life and Doctrine, the status of not merely an occasional writing, as the author himself suggests when he calls it a “volume of commentary and addendum” intended for those who are in the midst of studying critical philosophy; instead, we propose taking it as the most detailed study of the transcendental method applied to the reconstruction of the fundamental structures of the critical program. And therefore argue that this work is a precious philosophical and didactic legacy of the Marburg School. To this end, we will discuss how Kant - Life and Doctrine is structured around the transcendental method as the principle of reconstruction of the critical program and the guiding thread of the work's exposition.