Abstract
: Transformation or Deformation of the Subject? Ernst Cassirer and Critical Theory. Critical Theory has been concerned, since its foundations in the 1920s, with the pathological conditions of society. Although reason alone is considered sufficient to alter these conditions, its very sovereignty is supposed to be at the root of the problem. While Critical Theory’s concept of subjectivity tends to separate the subject, with its active elements and its structure of sovereignty, from passive nature which it casts in the role of material, Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of culture has a more sophisticated and even more critical concept of subjectivity. Following Kant’s aesthetics, Herder, Goethe, and Humboldt, Cassirer sketches a different context for the individual and its society: the context of the living form, which reminds us of an organism in its reflexive interaction with its surroundings, but which differs from the organic scheme by its faculties of design and configuration. This article claims that the project Critical Theory is still pursuing todaymight benefit from a synthesis with Cassirer’s concept of the individual, of the role of reason, and its possible influence on the conditions of our life.
