Body, Illness and Symbol in Ernst Cassirer

The aim of this paper is to study Cassirer’s philosophy of the body, and some of its foundations developed in the report entitled “Pathology of Symbolic Consciousness.” It details how patients with cerebral aphasia and apraxia are characterized by a loss of symboliza-tion abilities in the performance of operational tasks, as well as in their linguistic performance, which translates into a decrease in the ability to create cultural meaning. These cases allow one to evaluate the definition of the human being as a “symbolic animal” that is presented in An Essay on Man . An interpretative reading of both works is proposed to underline the role of the body in the development of (a) the symbolic formation process and (b) cultural development.