Customer Reviews

Language and Myth

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This little book is a revelation in 99 pages. It is highly theoretical and while it is not an easy read it is not beyond the comprehension of a layperson either. Cassirer's arguments lead me to think about language and consciousness itself in ways which I never have before, but which seem so amazingly right that I experienced many moments of epiphany. This book is an excellent rebuttal to the argument that reason is the origin and culmination of human thought and that all myth is rooted in ignorance (take that, Carl Sagan). If you are interested in theories of mythology and/or theories of language/linguistics, this book is a must.

My first book as a fledgling philosophy student was Cassirer's
work on the Enlightenment and I was in up over my head, but I stuck it out and learned a lot. So, when his book on myth and language came to my attention, I was familiar with the author and his reputation. I have not read the professional critiques on this work, but my personal opinion is that it is unique in every respect. I have not seen anything else that parallels the growth of myth (religion) and language as this does, nor have I seen anything that deals as effectively with the idea of epistemology that is quite apart from that of science and inductive probabilities. If you want to read what a brilliant man believes and substantiates about knowledge from a really different viewpoint, this may be the book for you. It is deep, but each page will grab you -- perhaps more than once.

How do we view the world and invent new processes and words to explain new objects, peoples and ideas? How did the ancients derive new meanings from existing words and combine them to explain new phenomena? Were those halos around the heads of saintly beings auras, space helmets, or were these beings holograms? Moses' halo was interpreted as horns in Northern European sculpture. A worthwhile read in a world today that requires new words every day to explain and name our technological advances. How we form these words and how are they transmitted and translated from culture to culture is explored in this excellent book. Read the Bible with new meaning. Be better able to interpret figurative meanings from literal meanings. Reinterpret what you thought to be dogmatic truth vs. myth and tradition and mere metaphor. Cassirer explores the evolution of language, and the invention of new words. This book is a timeless treasure.

How can such a small, easy to read, & to the point book reveal so much? Ernst Cassirer is a philosophical genius who writes to the common man without all the typical wasted German idealist wording. Help yourself to question the beginning, the history, & the continuing changes of how language & myth intertwine, & limit our human experience. Great starting book for the Philosophical beginner, & if you like this book, try Ernst Cassirer's other well written, but larger book: "Essay on Man".

I loved this book. If you are interested in linguistics and philosophy, this is the book. After reading this you may have a whole new perspective on the origins of language, that is if you are a student of linguistics. I highly recommend this to those interested in ancient texts and languages, myths, logic and the development of human intellect.

Language is such a basic part of our lives that we little stop to consider its origins or the signifigance of those origins.

All the more reason for the importance of this book which anticipated modern anthropological findings about the nexus between language and religion over fifty years later. Though the book is by no means an easy read it was first on the scene in at least two important ways.

One, as mentioned, was its connection between language and myth in the first place. One only has to review the Wade book, "Before the Dawn" to see the truth of the thesis about the connection between religion and the birth of language (now dated to about fifty thousand years ago).

Two, like the later Lakoff and Johnson book "Metaphors We Live By" Cassirer was keen to observe the metaphorical structure of language by pressing pre existing cognitive systems into service for understanding more -- otherwise theoretical -- constructs. Unlike Lakoff and Johnson, however, Cassirer was working well before the advent of modern anthropology.

And additionally, the book gives some sense of the original revolutionary nature of language. Just as printing and more recently the internet would have powerful social impact, so language itself originally established a dramatic new matrix.

I was unsure about this book as I had read Cassirer's book on Kant, which was excellent, but I disagreed with much of his interpretation. I prefer Heidegger's reading of Kantian philosophy - so I was little skeptical about how Cassirer would treat the topic of language and its origins in myth (or myth's origins in language). Couldn't have been more wrong. This is an excellent book that every philosophy or anthropology student should read. It's short - I read it in two or three sittings - but is dense with insight. There is a small nod to Kant, which is appropriate, in the beginning - and the density of his prose at times reminds me of reading the master himself, but well worth the mental effort. Basically, as the introduction states, Cassirer is interested in the relationship between the evolution of language and the evolution of myth. What he concludes is that myth is a pre-logical system that results much in the same way Kant concluded logic results in metaphysics. That is, language by its very nature presupposes a totality, a specific logical order that is constantly drawing relations and connections - and that myth reflects the tendencies of language to organize experience according to these structure - but - and this is the catch - within the framework of a "non abstracted" language. That is, a language that has yet to undergo the sort of mental abstraction that develops with the modern use of language. I have read other scholars who have drawn similar conclusions in regards to how words functioned in pre-literate societies, the power of naming (as seen in creation myths) and origins of language and man. Great stuff!

The origin of language is one of the most fascinating anthropological, psychological and historical puzzles. A lot of ink has been spilled in attempts to provide a satisfactory answer to this big question, and with the advent of some more advanced scientific tools in recent decades we've been able to get a pretty definite picture of the human language. Nonetheless, this is one of the scientific topics that is fraught with a lot of controversy, primarily in terms of which of the several competing schools of thought makes the best case based on the available evidence. In other words, even with the most up-to-date scientific research there is still a lot of room for various conceptual and philosophical interpretations.

"Language and Myth" is a unique take on the origins of language and its connection to myths. The central thesis of this slim book is that language has its origin in mythical speculations and those gave language the necessary impetus for development. Ernst Cassirer makes a good use of many of the contemporary anthropological and philological sources, and he aims to present a unified picture of myth and language. However, even though there are several very interesting ideas in this book, the author is too fond of engaging in inflated verbiage. It is not always clear what are the points that are being made, or how various insights relate to each other. The book seems to be too steeped in speculative psychology that was very popular at the time but has not stood the test of time. Nonetheless, this is a valuable book to read for anyone who is interested in the history of ideas in general. However, for more recent understanding of the nature and origin of language I would recommend some other popular books, such as Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct."

It is probably due to the quality of the translation that this slim little book feels so tedious & tiring. Some passages are so convoluted with empty "academic" language, you have to read the same paragraph several times in order to extract its meaning.

Because my interest is in magic and mythology rather than philosophy, I found Cassirer's ideas to be interesting, but not surprising. There's nothing in here that couldn't be found elsewhere. The connection between naming and existence, between language and myth and reality, has been made innumerable times (in more profound & meaningful terms) in the literature of mysticism, religion and metaphysics. Cassirer merely juxtaposes the information and states his conclusions in his own way - and there is value in exploring his perspective on the subject, clarifying some connections and serving to strengthen some of my own semi-formed ideas. I do not agree with his implied assumption that the Judeo-Christian mythical model is the epitome or acme of an evolutionary process of thought from more "primitive" forms. He does not make "primitive" into quite the pejorative that it has been in the hands of other theorists, but there is still an implicit (and erroneous) value judgment here. Other than that, I found little to disagree with.

This is a useful (but not necessary) book for the perusal of those who might be seeking some sort of mystical enlightenment or attempting to uncover some sort of "truth" at the root of language and the strange artifacts of our collective cultural heritage.