What Does It Mean to Be Human? Ernst Cassirer on Symbols, Science, and Stories

You’re sitting at a desk. Around you are books, a phone, maybe a snack wrapper. You’re looking at words on a screen. None of these things existed in their current form a hundred years ago. But here’s a stranger thought: none of them would exist at all if human beings didn’t do something that no other animal does.

We make symbols.

Not just sounds or signals—every animal does that. We make things that stand for other things. A flag stands for a country. A number stands for a quantity you can’t see. A story stands for something that never happened but still feels true. A mathematical equation stands for a relationship between forces you can’t touch. And somehow, by making these symbols, we create entire worlds that don’t exist anywhere else.

A German philosopher named Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) thought this was the most important thing about being human. He called us “symbolic animals.” This article is about what he meant by that, and why it still matters.

The Puzzle That Started It

Cassirer began his career thinking about science. Specifically, he was obsessed with a puzzle that had bothered philosophers for centuries: how can mathematics—which is just patterns in our heads—tell us anything true about the real world?

Think about it. You can imagine a perfect triangle, but you’ve never seen one. Every triangle you’ve ever actually encountered has slightly wobbly sides, imperfect angles. And yet, when you do geometry with your imaginary perfect triangle, you can predict things about real bridges and real buildings. How does that work?

For a long time, philosophers had two basic answers. One group said: we just notice patterns in the world and write them down. The other group said: our minds come pre-loaded with certain shapes and rules, and we impose them on the world.

Cassirer thought both answers were wrong—or rather, both were too simple. What actually happens, he thought, is something much stranger and more creative.

The Genetic Conception: Knowledge as a Growing Plant

Here’s where it gets technical, but the idea itself isn’t that hard. Let me give you a metaphor.

Imagine you’re learning to recognize dogs. When you’re two years old, “dog” might mean “that fluffy thing that barks.” Then you learn that some dogs don’t bark much. Then you learn that wolves are different from dogs, even though they look similar. Then you learn about breeds, about evolution, about the genetic relationship between wolves and dogs. Each time you learn something new, your concept of “dog” changes. But it doesn’t just get bigger—it gets reorganized. The old idea of “dog” turns out to have been a kind of rough draft for the better one.

This is what Cassirer, following his teacher Hermann Cohen, called the “genetic” conception of knowledge. Knowledge isn’t a pile of facts you add to. It’s a process, like a plant growing—the earlier stages are contained in the later ones, but transformed. The old Euclidean geometry wasn’t wrong when Einstein came along; it turned out to be a special case of a bigger, more general geometry. The old idea of “force” in physics wasn’t discarded; it got absorbed into a more abstract mathematical description.

But Cassirer took this further than his teachers. He noticed something important: the same pattern doesn’t just happen in science. It happens in everything human beings do.

Three Ways of Making Meaning

Cassirer argued that human beings have three basic ways of creating meaning, and they build on each other like layers. He called them the expressive function, the representative function, and the significative function. Let me translate.

First layer: Expressive meaning. This is the most basic. When you see a dark shape in a doorway at night and your heart pounds—that’s expressive meaning. You’re not thinking “that might be a burglar.” You’re not even thinking at all. The shape feels threatening. For Cassirer, this is the foundation of what he called “mythical consciousness”—the way of being in the world where things are just charged with emotion, where a name isn’t just a label but part of the thing itself, where a symbol and what it stands for haven’t been separated yet.

You can see this in how little kids treat their stuffed animals, or in how fans react when someone burns their team’s flag. The symbol is the thing, at this level.

Second layer: Representative meaning. This is where language comes in. When you say “that dog over there” and point, you’re doing something remarkable: you’re using a sound (the word “dog”) to stand for a category of things, and another sound (“that”) to pick out a specific one, and another (“over there”) to locate it in space relative to you. You’re building a little model of the world using sounds.

This layer gives us things: stable objects that persist through time, that can be identified and talked about even when they’re not present. It gives us the distinction between appearance and reality—between the way the dog looks from here and the way it actually is. And it gives us the basic structure of ordinary language, with its nouns and verbs and tenses that let us talk about what happened yesterday and what might happen tomorrow.

Third layer: Significative meaning. This is the most abstract. This is mathematics, formal logic, theoretical physics—any system where the symbols relate to each other in purely formal ways, without needing to point to anything you can see or touch. In pure mathematics, you can define a number without counting anything. You can define a geometric space that doesn’t exist in the physical world. And then—here’s the amazing part—you can use those purely formal systems to discover things about the real world.

Einstein used non-Euclidean geometry—a purely mathematical invention that no one could see or touch—to predict that light would bend around massive objects. And it turned out to be true. How is that possible? Cassirer’s answer was: because the third layer grows out of the first two, not by leaving them behind but by transforming them. The same creative process that makes a two-year-old see a monster in a shadow is what makes a physicist see a differential equation in the trajectory of a planet.

Why This Matters Right Now

Cassirer wrote his biggest book, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in the 1920s. But his most urgent work came at the end of his life, after he fled Nazi Germany and settled in the United States. The book was called The Myth of the State, and it was an attempt to understand how a civilized, educated nation could descend into barbarism.

Cassirer’s diagnosis was chilling. He thought the Nazis had figured out how to bypass people’s rational, representative, and significative capacities and talk directly to the expressive layer—the layer where symbols are just charged with emotion, where slogans don’t need to make logical sense, where a flag isn’t a symbol of a country but is the country. They used modern technology—radio, film, mass rallies—to awaken and manipulate the mythical consciousness that is always present in every human being, just beneath the surface.

The scariest part of his argument is this: the third layer (science, logic, abstraction) doesn’t replace the first layer (myth, emotion, expressive meaning). It builds on top of it. But what’s underneath never goes away. A physicist can still be swept up by a myth. A mathematician can still be moved by a symbol in ways that have nothing to do with logic. We are never fully rational creatures, because rationality is just one of the ways we make meaning—and it depends on the other ways to exist at all.

Where Cassirer Stood

Cassirer was not a pessimist. He believed that human culture was a real achievement, that the movement from expressive meaning through representative meaning to significative meaning was a genuine development, and that we could choose to continue it. But he also thought this was a choice, not a inevitability. The future is always open—and always up to us.

He positioned himself between two other philosophers. On one side was Martin Heidegger, who argued that human beings are fundamentally finite, trapped in their own limited perspective, unable to reach any eternal or universal truths. Cassirer respected Heidegger but disagreed: he thought that in mathematics and in morality, we do reach something universal—not because we escape our humanity, but because the process of making symbols itself carries us beyond any particular moment or place.

On the other side was Hegel, who thought that history was the unfolding of a single divine Reason that would eventually comprehend everything. Cassirer admired Hegel but thought he went too far. For Cassirer, there is no final endpoint, no moment when all the symbols are complete. There is only the endless process of creating new meanings, new forms, new ways of understanding. The “end” is not something we reach but something we approach asymptotically—getting closer and closer without ever arriving.

He once put it this way: truth is not something we find; it’s something we make. But that doesn’t mean anything goes. The symbols we make have to work—they have to let us navigate the world, communicate with each other, build things that don’t fall down. And they have to be open to revision, to being absorbed into a larger framework, to being seen as a special case of something more general.

So What?

You might be wondering: does any of this actually matter? Here’s why I think it does.

Every day, you swim in symbols. The words you’re reading right now are symbols. The grades on your report card are symbols. The money in your pocket is a symbol. The idea of “America” or “justice” or “friendship” is a symbol—a complex one, built up from thousands of smaller symbols over centuries.

Cassirer’s philosophy says: pay attention to what you’re doing when you use these symbols. Don’t treat them as if they were just tools you pick up and put down. They are the medium you live in. They shape what you can think, what you can feel, what you can become. And they are not fixed. You can rework them. You can create new ones. You can discover that an old symbol was really a rough draft for a better one.

The question Cassirer leaves us with is not “What is true?” or “What is real?” but a stranger, more human question: “What kind of world are we going to make with our symbols?”

Appendices

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Symbolic form	A basic way human beings create meaning—like language, myth, science, or art; each is a complete system that shapes how we experience the world
Expressive function	The most basic kind of meaning-making, where things feel emotionally charged without us thinking about them; the foundation of myth
Representative function	The kind of meaning-making that gives us stable objects and ordinary language; it separates appearance from reality
Significative function	The most abstract kind of meaning-making, found in mathematics and formal logic; it creates pure systems of relations
Genetic conception of knowledge	The idea that knowledge grows and develops over time, with earlier stages being absorbed and transformed into later ones
Mythical consciousness	A way of experiencing the world where symbols and what they stand for haven’t been separated; everything is charged with emotion and meaning

Key People

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) — A German-Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis and spent his last years in the US. He argued that human beings are fundamentally “symbolic animals,” and that culture is the result of our endless creativity in making meanings.
Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) — Cassirer’s teacher, the first Jewish professor in Germany. He started the “Marburg School” of philosophy, which focused on science and mathematics as the key to understanding human knowledge.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) — A rival philosopher who debated Cassirer in 1929. Heidegger argued that human beings are fundamentally finite and cannot reach universal truths; Cassirer disagreed.
G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) — A German philosopher who thought history was the unfolding of a single, divine Reason. Cassirer admired him but thought there was no final endpoint to this process.

Things to Think About

Cassirer says that the “expressive” layer of meaning (where symbols are emotionally charged) never goes away—it’s always underneath our rational thinking. Can you think of a time when you reacted to a symbol emotionally, even though you knew rationally that it “wasn’t real”? What does that tell you about yourself?
If human beings are “symbolic animals,” and if the symbols we use shape what we can think, then what happens when we encounter someone whose symbols are very different from ours? Are they living in a different reality? Can we ever really understand each other?
Cassirer thought that the Nazis succeeded by bypassing people’s rational capacities and talking directly to the “mythical” layer of consciousness. Do you see this happening anywhere today—in politics, advertising, social media? What would Cassirer say we should do about it?
If knowledge is always growing and changing, and if there’s no final “right answer,” then how do we know if we’re making progress? What would count as getting better vs. just changing?

Where This Shows Up

Your phone and computer — Every app, every interface, every game is a system of symbols designed to shape how you think and feel. Cassirer would say: pay attention to what world these symbols are building for you.
Social media arguments — People fight over symbols (flags, memes, hashtags) as if they were literally fighting over the things themselves. That’s the “mythical” layer Cassirer warned about.
Mathematics and science class — Next time you’re learning a formula, ask yourself: where did this come from? Was it discovered or invented? Cassirer would say: it’s not that simple—it’s both, because symbols grow and transform over time.
Art and music — Paintings, songs, and stories are symbolic forms that don’t try to be “true” in the scientific sense, but still shape how we feel and understand the world. Cassirer thought this was just as important as science.