Art as Symbolic Form: Cassirer on the
Educational Value of Art
by THORA ILIN BAYER
Introduction
Among the papers that Ernst Cassirer left at his death in 1945 is a fully written
out lecture labeled "Seminar of Education, March 10th, 1943," which
also bears the title "The Educational Value of Art." It may have been prepared
for a session of Cassirer's seminar at Yale for that spring on Aesthetics:
Symbolic Forms, the second half of a yearlong course. The text begins
with discussion of the Platonic quarrel with the poets and moves through
views of various thinkers, especially Croce and Collingwood. Cassirer had
planned to have a volume on art included in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,
in addition to those on Language, Mythical Thought, and The Phenomenology of
Knowledge. In these three volumes he often mentions the triad of language,
myth, and art, but he says little of art as such.
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