The Myth Of The State Callier Analysis

The purpose of Cassirer’s writing of “The Myth of the State” is to clarify how myth was able to capture great significance in the political discourse and thought from Europe and particularly from Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. Needless to say, this occurrence was not an accidental one according to Cassirer. He affirms that myth is not a clump of mistakes, but a way of thinking and symbolizing which remains at the origin of human culture. Cassirer’s own conclusion on myth may be summarized as follows: as opposed to art and science which gives us a unity of intuition and thought, “religion and myth gives us a unity of feeling. It begins with the awareness of the universality and fundamental identity of life” (37). In Cassirer’s “Myth of the State,” he asserts that “myth does not arise solely from intellectual processes” (43). Rather, it comes from deep human emotions and is the expression of emotion.

Cassirer connects myth with the notion of explaining death. He asserts that in mythical thought the mystery of death is turned into an …show more content…
The dilemma that they face is the “self-destruction of the Enlightenment.” The enlightenment cannot forget its own dialectic; that is, to enlighten Enlightenment about itself. Horkheimer and Adorno starts off by saying that “freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking (xvi) and also talks about the “reversion of enlightened civilization to barbarism in reality” (xix). They assert that society has not progressed toward freedom, but it is rather moving backwards and is submerging into barbarism. According to them, the cause of this dark turnabout is due to the indefatigable self-destructiveness of enlightenment. Their analysis results in a paradox which is the critical part of this writing: “myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology”