This paper articulates some points of contact between Ernst Cassirer and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by analysing the influence of Cassirer’s masterwork, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. There are two concepts developed in Cassirer’s late philosophy of culture, that are of particular importance for understanding its influence on Merleau-Ponty’s thought – ‘symbolic form’ and ‘symbolic pregnance’. Symbolic forms may be broadly understood as contexts of meaning within which certain cultural formations take shape. Symbolic pregnance refers to the containment of a symbolic form within any given cultural formation – the two concepts of symbolic form and symbolic pregnance are thus intimately related. Seeing how these concepts play out in the unique context of Merleau-Ponty’s thought allows us to gain some level of clarity on the nature of Merleau-Ponty’s relationship to the Neo-Kantian approach championed by Ernst Cassirer, and thus to Kantianism more generally.
