ABSTRACT
Ernst Cassirer speaks elsewhere of an expression of the "mental" in the widest possible sense through physical "signs" and "pictures". As Cassirer repeats on all levels of his theory, symbols are characterized as the expression of the mental by a dialectic of articulation. One of the symbolic forms, one of the typical kinds of symbolization and hence also of the formation of reality, is, according to Cassirer's programmatic plan, language. Cassirer's systematic intent to identify the functional unity of culture spontaneous and productive activity through a boundless concept of metaphor, bears a remarkable similarity to Friedrich Nietzsche's intention of describing the omnipresent creativity of man by using just such a concept of metaphor. Cassirer does speak of the importance of language for the 'structure of consciousness' in a significant passage of his essay from 1932, in which the real object of inquiry seems to be the structure of the world of objects.
