卡西尔是德国20世纪最重要的哲学家之一，他的象征形式哲学研究了包括语言、神话、艺术和科学在内的人类精神文化整体。审美思想在卡西尔的象征形式哲学中占有重要地位，它促使卡西尔将康德的“理性批判”拓展为“文化批判”，是其确立人文学科方法论的重要推动力。目前，对卡西尔美学的研究局限在对其后期美学论述的考察，既忽略了其美学的发展过程，又缺乏对其美学与同时代德国其他哲学美学的相同和差异的分析。本研究对卡西尔前期文本进行了细读和阐释，追溯了卡西尔美学思想发展的历程，将其前期美学的产生与其对新康德主义、生命哲学和现象学的接受和批判联系起来，明确了卡西尔美学的思想来源，理顺了卡西尔前后期美学思想的关系。 卡西尔美学继承了新康德主义的建构理论，并将其拓展到文化领域。同时，卡西尔吸收生命哲学将生命作为不能还原的元现象的观点，批判了“精神”和“生命”之间的绝对对立。此外，卡西尔还融合了现象学理论，将知觉作为具有思维功能的主动性直观活动。对生命哲学和现象学的吸收，帮助他将审美纳入象征形式哲学之中。 卡西尔认为，柏拉图对事物内在形式的“观”和单纯外形的“看”的区分，使得其后的美学周旋在“理念的美”和“感性的美”的争执之中，德国18世纪美学试图通过寻找“艺术法则”与“艺术自由”之间的平衡解决这一争执，二者的调和最终在康德和歌德的互释中完成。康德美学实际上承认了一种区别于数理思维的直观能力，歌德诗歌创作和自然科学研究的“造型力”是这一思维的具体呈现。卡西尔通过康德与歌德的结合，对康德美学进行了象征形式哲学改造。经过对康德美学的吸收和对歌德美学的融汇，他的美学思想最终在象征形式体系中得到表达。卡西尔将艺术作为一种特殊的象征形式，艺术和科学是神话在两个不同方向上发展的结果，神话在通过逻辑语言向科学发展的过程中，虽然脱去了直接性，却也丧失了直观性，导致特殊性消弭在普遍因果链条之中。艺术为科学寻回了神话的世界，同时通过纯碎形式的创造，摆脱了神话直接性的束缚。作为一种独立的精神创造方式，艺术运用直观的形式将意义以“包孕性”的方式表达出来。在文艺复兴研究中，卡西尔描绘了神话、艺术与科学思维相互交融的图景。
Ernst Cassirer was one of the most important German philosophers of the 20th century. His Philosophy of Symbolic Forms regards language, myth, art and science as well as other forms of objectifications of the human spirit as a whole. Aesthetic thought plays an important role in Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. It is the driving force that helps Cassirer expanding Kant’s “critique of reason” into “critique of culture” and establishing the methodology of the humanities. Current research on Cassirer’s aesthetics is limited to the investigation of his later works, which not only ignore the development process of his aesthetics thought but also lack the analysis of the similarities and differences between his aesthetics and that of the contemporary German philosophers. This research constitutes a close analysis and interpretation of Cassirer’s earlier texts and traces the progress of the development of Cassirer’s aesthetic thought. At the same time, it links the emergence of Cassirer’s aesthetics with his acceptance and criticism of Neo-Kantianism, the Philosophy of Life and the Phenomenology, which helps to clarify the theoretical sources of Cassirer’s aesthetics. This research shows that Cassirer’s aesthetics inherits the Neo-Kantianism epistemological constructivism and extends it to the field of Humanities. He absorbs the idea of the Philosophy of Life at the same time, which regards life as an irreducible “Metaphenomenon” and criticizes the dualism between “spirit” and “life”. In addition, Cassirer reforms the idea of Phenomenology, which regards perception as an active intuitive activity containing thinking. The assimilation of the Philosophy of Life and the Phenomenology helps Cassirer to incorporate aesthetics into the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer believes that Plato’s distinction between the “inner form of things”(Eidos) and the “external form of things”(Eidolon) makes the subsequent aesthetics in the dispute between “ideological beauty” and “perceptual beauty”. German aesthetics of the 18th Centuries tried to recombine these two forms by finding the balance between the “Rule of Art” and the “Freedom of Art”. The reconciliation was finally completed in the mutual interpretation of Kant and Goethe. Kant’s aesthetics actually admitted an intuitive thinking which is different from mathematical thinking, and the “creative force”(bildende Kraft) of Goethe’s poetry and natural-scientific research was an embodiment of this kind of thinking. Through the combination of Kant and Goethe, Cassirer carries out a philosophical transformation of Kant’s aesthetics. Through the fusion of Kant’s and Goethe’s aesthetics, Cassirer finally expresses his theory of art in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer regards art as an important member of Symbolic Forms. Art and science come from myth, which develops in two different directions with the help of language. In the process of Myth developing into Science through logical Language, it freed itself of the bonds of empirical world but at the same time, it also lost its intuition of the world. As a result, the particularities disappear in the chain of universal cause and effect. Art is, on the contrary, reclaiming the world of myth for science, which is at the same time freed from the shackles of immediacy by creating the “pure form”. As an independent form of spiritual creation, art uses intuitive forms to express meaning in an “precise” (pr?gnant) way. In Renaissance studies, Cassirer paints a picture of the intermingling of myth, art and science.
