Ernst Cassirer, Hannah Arendt, and the twentieth century revival of philosophical anthropology

This essay suggests that Hannah Arendt was influenced by Ernst Cassirer’s revival of the Kantian discourse of philosophical anthropology, an approach which critiqued metaphysical and environmentally determinist theories of human nature and instead interpreted human being in cultural terms as ‘open to the world’. The article suggests that Arendt’s focus on human plurality as the condition of meaning and subject formation may have been influenced by Ernst Cassirer’s dialogical philosophy of symbolic forms. Lastly the essay explores the political implications of Cassirer and Arendt’s anthropology of human culture. Where Cassirer’s cosmopolitan anthropology often refuses a conventional or Eurocentric determination of cultural agency, Arendt tended to trope her conception of a durable ‘human world’ as the antithesis of the primitive and indigenous, the lifeworld of so-called Naturvölker.