The problem of Bildung

It seems self-evident that the formation of a whole human being requires not only the development of our mental and sensitive faculties, but also an assessment of our history and culture. A number of philosophers also argue that self-formation, or Bildung (as I will henceforth call this process, in lieu of an appropriate English term), needs to include an explicit reference to our transcendent grounding, which is part of this cultural background. However, our understanding of this background faces some serious difficulties, since our history and especially our religion are neither rationally nor sensitively accessible, but need to be deciphered in their written manifestations. Hence, a specific form of religious hermeneutics turns out to play an important role in human Bildung.

Nevertheless, the manifestation of a revealed religion in writing and ritual is subject to the dual nature of its tools: its signs are always in danger of being misunderstood, or misused in a practice which is no longer religious proper, but idolatrous, in that the sign itself becomes reified as the divine. Consequently, our self-formation is threatened by seemingly inevitable misunderstandings. But if revealed religion forms a decisive part of Bildung, how can the interpretation of its written sources escape any such deformation? In this article, I will concentrate on Moses Mendelssohn's solution of this problem, but also consider a later, and necessary, extension of his views by Ernst Cassirer. I will argue that both account for a performance-based understanding of religion that avoids just these pitfalls by placing individual awareness of the significative process of religious rituals within an intersubjective context of a shared culture.

Mendelssohn's view of religion as ritual has been a topic of debate for quite some time – especially its innovative foundation, which is a theory of signification. Whereas Alexander Altmann dismisses Mendelssohn's theory of language as ‘speculative’,Footnote ¹ more recent studies show a heightened interest in the connection of his theory about the use, abuse, and development of symbolic language with his account of the importance of ritual in Judaism.Footnote ² This article will contribute to this debate by clarifying and extending the arguments involved.

A few words on the envisioned clarification: Mendelssohn must be credited for mediating between the rational enlightened self and the religious norms that this self is encumbered with in the cultural traditions surrounding her. Particularly in his late writings from the 1780s, Mendelssohn argues that a specific religious creed is needed for forming a whole human being: faith in a revealed religion fosters the establishment of an authentic self, in that it relates the individual to her rational and sensitive faculties. It further calls on her to communicate these powers to others. Mendelssohn's key to the aforementioned problem of idolatrous misuse, as I will show in the next section of this article, is a concept of religion as practice. A good religious community must be an open field of communication and discussion. This does not only bind people together, but also enables them to assess critically the very roots of their self-understanding as being embedded in the religious and cultural ties of such a community. The critical potential of this view, however elaborately defended in the literature, is still not quite convincing, as I will show in the next section. Mendelssohn is not clear about how the intersubjective practice of ritual really does engender the formation of religion proper without putting the essence of revealed religion as an embodiment of a divine will into question.

In third section of this article, I thus extend my discussion of Mendelssohn's account with a reference to Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, or, more concretely, his theory of religion as one instance of human ‘world-apprehension’ (Weltverständnis). Cassirer provides us with a deeper account of the communicability of our faith in reframing religion as an ethical expression of the attitude towards the members of a community as partners in ritual. My reconstruction will allow us to appreciate the process of religious signification in rituals, and enable us to see these rituals as an important contribution to the philosophy of religion and culture in general: rituals in and of themselves must be situated in a dialogical structure. Only such an active mode of understanding and intersubjective exchange of religious ritual prevents its ideological or idolatrous misuse, and reveals it as a key component of self-formation within culture. In the end, we may not be able to uphold the core of revealed religion as the revelation of a fixed essence, but instead as the revelation of a way of life that fosters both our individual understanding and our communal ties.

Mendelssohn's concept of religion as practice

In general terms, Bildung, according to Mendelssohn, is the enlightened way of becoming a self. It consists of two aspects. On the one hand it points to the enhancement of rationality, which Mendelssohn calls ‘enlightenment’,Footnote ³ while on the other it facilitates the individual's practical awareness of and engagement with her environment, since a person is not only formed by rational understanding but also by her history, traditions, and community. In his essay ‘On the question: what does “to enlighten” mean?’ (1784), Mendelssohn calls this practical or social aspect of Bildung ‘culture’.Footnote ⁴ In his Jerusalem (1783), he further argues that revealed religion as an integral part of Bildung should address both aspects – rationality and history, ‘enlightenment’ and ‘culture’ – without morphing into psychological coercion. To sustain this view, Mendelssohn further differentiates between the areas of natural and revealed religion. Concerning ‘enlightenment’ or rationality, natural religion reveals the eternal truths about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul: ‘I recognize no eternal truths other than those that are not merely comprehensible to human reason but can also be demonstrated and verified by human powers.'Footnote ⁵ Mendelssohn holds that the existence and unity of God, the fulfilment of human destiny, and the immortality of the soul are – as truths of reason – given to humankind not in ‘word and writing’, but by the order of nature, and are understood through reason. Even if actually announced otherwise, their valid proof must remain within the boundaries of reason.

But, and this is Mendelssohn's particular point, revealed religion goes beyond those rational truths as a crucial part of ‘culture’. It positions the individual within her own history and communal tradition. Those who happen to have a faith should not just rid themselves of it by rational arguments, but instead should be allowed to keep it up as part of their cultural identity.Footnote ⁶ Thus, ‘culture’ should offer the means to unify subjective and intersubjective demands; that is, to bring the claims of one's history, society, and religious revelation into accordance with one's individual needs. It should do so, Mendelssohn argues, by offering effective means of communication among these entities, so that they do not turn against each other (and thus to avoid the later so-called ‘Dialectics of Enlightenment’).Footnote ⁷ The proper interpretation of revelation – as a move between these two realms of the individual and her community and history – thus plays an important role within human self-formation and serves as a foundation of human ‘culture’. Mendelssohn's emphasis on the worth of Scripture as one source of revealed religion, however, does not mean a full literary dependency on it. In a letter to Carl von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, Mendelssohn explains in quite Spinozistic fashion that, first, he does not take much trouble to decipher all ‘dark passages’ in Scripture, since he cannot bring himself to see that the spiritual well-being of mankind depends on these ‘passages in a book written unthinkable times ago, in a foreign, now dead language for a specific people in Asia’. Second, he takes several passages to be written ‘to engage the heart, not to teach the understanding’.Footnote ⁸ Apparently, his ultimate criterion for the truth of Scripture is its compatibility with the truths of natural religion. But Mendelssohn also supports a refined version of this ‘engagement of the heart’ in his notion of Bildung as an indispensable means to building a unified personality, in that it connects us with the historical, contingent truths that form our cultural background. This engagement of our emotional and cultural ties counterbalances our enlightened, rational understanding of ourselves and our world. Let me explain this cultural value of the interpretation of revealed religion in more detail.

Mendelssohn does not believe that natural and revealed religion are fully congruent. He holds that revealed religion covers the wider scope of practical human concerns, and is thus indispensable, even if it can only address those who witnessed and/or have faith in this particular revelation. Mendelssohn's aim is thus to reconcile the universal and fixed essence of natural religion with the dynamic realization of revealed religion, particularly within Judaism. For Mendelssohn, the essence of Judaism as a revealed religion is that it is a pure revelation of lawFootnote ⁹ that guides a particular way of living. Hence, a Jew is not forced to simply believe ancient stories of revelation, but needs to enliven those peculiar events in history through the performance of prescribed rituals.Footnote ¹⁰ In their specific form, such ceremonial laws serve as ‘constant reminders … of the particular historical experiences of the Jewish people in which divine providence had manifested itself’,Footnote ¹¹ and therewith join history to individual lives. What is decisive about Mendelssohn's argument is that he calls for a particular human technique for the realization of these laws. His predecessor Spinoza also marked obedience to the words of a God as the essential aspect of revealed religion. But whereas Spinoza seeks to abolish ‘obedience’ to mere ‘paper and ink’,Footnote ¹² which he sees as a form of external (or politically motivated) coercion, Mendelssohn stresses the importance of the commandments with respect to our fundamental cultural capacities: the ability to signify, and to identify with the signified through performance. According to Mendelssohn, revealed religion should teach the ability to lead a good communal life. To this purpose, it instantiates and strengthens historical, rather than eternal, truths. But it can only serve this purpose if the individuals who constitute the community themselves play a role in understanding these historical truths. Thus, the unifying force of Scripture does not lie in its stories or prophecies – which can only be read, or listened to – but in the individual and communal practice of its laws and rituals. Human beings do not have any other access to the historical truth of revelation except through tradition. And only through the performance of this tradition, Mendelssohn holds, can the individual build herself (here the German term Bildung reflects this activity most accurately).

Mendelssohn makes a further, equally important claim: the enhancement of ‘culture’ in revealed religion, via the re-enactment of traditions, only comes about through a refined understanding of the language used in Scripture. He turns to the ceremonial laws as ‘symbolic actions’, a new kind of language that can help keep a cultural memory alive. In a letter to Herz Homberg,Footnote ¹³ Mendelssohn argues against mere ‘articles of faith, symbols, formulas’ as well as ‘maxims and opinions’, which all simply tie reason to prejudice, and opts for ‘actions’ instead. In Jerusalem, he dwells more explicitly on the symbolic nature of these ‘actions’: only this form of language is undisturbed by personal proclivities hidden in biased writings, or in the misreading of writings. Additionally, such a ‘language’, which does not consist in ‘words and written characters’ (Schriftzeichen) but in pure ‘actions’ (Handlungen), must be part of a ‘living, spiritual instruction’ (lebendigen, geistigen Unterrichte).Footnote ¹⁴ This account of language is highly original, but so far it is not clear whether Mendelssohn's division between the language of writing and the language of symbolic action can fully satisfy the need to avoid idolatry and foster Bildung instead.

In Arnold Eisen's formulation, Mendelssohn supports ‘the turn to a new sort of “script” written not in characters [i.e. letters, A. P.] but in actions’.Footnote ¹⁵ Eisen, however, also shows that Mendelssohn fails to prove the supposed advantage of the concreteness of actions over the vagueness of written signs. There may be many ways to misinterpret actions, as well as there are many ways to misinterpret letters. If there is a mismatch between the letter and its spirit, the actions guided by positive (that is: written) laws will also not escape this divide: the interpretation of their written or otherwise conceptual source will need proper interpretation even before the actions can actually be performed. And even if this source is not taken to be a written word, but a concept in oral language, there is still the danger of disfiguring it.Footnote ¹⁶ This means that the emphasis on law-governed actions is endangered to lead to the same kind of idolatry as the written word alone does. It is still based, very simply, on something written, or, as Mendelssohn sometimes puts it, on a ‘concept’, rather than an ‘action’.Footnote ¹⁷ But this part of Eisen's interpretationFootnote ¹⁸ misses the fact that Mendelssohn understands the enactment of rituals not as a word- or concept-based communication – which would indeed force him to make an artificial distinction between letters and their spiritFootnote ¹⁹ – but as something performative. That is, Mendelssohn focuses on the wordless (and concept-less) aspect of ritual in a living religious tradition. Mendelssohn indeed tries to avoid the disfiguring of the spirit through words and writing by arguing that rituals are not passed down through written sources, but are actively acquired through their performance. Thus, understanding them is not a movement from spirit to any form of letter and back to spirit again. We do not acquire an understanding of the spirit of the ceremonial laws through their written remnants, but through our active engagement with performed rituals in a community. For our further inquiry we need to take Mendelssohn up on exactly this point.

In her illuminating analysis of Mendelssohn's ‘normative theory’ of writing, Carola Hilfrich focuses on the relation between the sign and the agents of sign-comprehension and sign-usage as either authors or preventers of idolatry. For Hilfrich, Mendelssohn's turn towards these agents, through his stress on ‘actions’ rather than ‘words and symbols’, gives reason to reinterpret his view on the practice of religion as an act of both ‘resistance’ and ‘self-determination’.Footnote ²⁰ But Hilfrich does not pay enough attention to Mendelssohn's account of the performative character of Jewish rituals – without which her argument for resistance against authoritative misuse of religion remains too vague to be convincing. In a similar way to Freudenthal, to whom I shall turn later, Hilfrich rightly holds that ‘[t]o be human means to engage in activities of signification, which always risks producing ambiguity or profanation’.Footnote ²¹ But apart from announcing that each member of the religious community ‘shares in the creation of [the law's] significance’,Footnote ²² Hilfrich's analysis offers little help in showing how this act of ‘resistance’ against idolatry might actually be achieved. I suggest that, according to Mendelssohn, it cannot be reading and writing alone that manifest the individual's claim on her own history, but rather her authentic and communal performance of rituals counterbalances the notorious ambiguity of mere letter-dependency. Hilfrich hints at this view,Footnote ²³ but in order to confront Eisen's reservations, more than a hint is needed.

The performance of rituals in a living tradition

With his positive judgement about the law-guided (halachic) character of Judaism, Mendelssohn deviates from Spinoza's more critical understanding of religious ritual. Like Spinoza, Mendelssohn holds that the core teachings of positive religion come about in a ‘human manner, that is, through words and writing’.Footnote ²⁴ Against Spinoza, the individual practice and understanding of the laws shall not be understood as a case of fixed authority or political interest, but as a reasonable interpretation against the background of one's culture. Thus, even these ‘words’ are not the core of ceremonial laws. To take them only as words would turn them into idols (see Eisen's critique mentioned above), which in turn would transform religion into an abstract intellectual doctrine. Words and books (and therewith – see Hilfrich – also writing), as Mendelssohn complains, mostly serve to isolate human beings, whereas the correct practice of religion should strengthen both the individual and her roots in the community. This is achieved only by the ‘production of meaning through performance’Footnote ²⁵ as an intersubjective task: we learn what faith is by performing the relevant rituals together.

Only at first sight does it seems paradoxical that the ceremonial laws are necessarily restricted to a minimum of words and explications; Mendelssohn's point is that this in fact promotes their survival, since these words need to be completed by a living, essentially intersubjective tradition to be meaningful at all. The laws do not simply call for mindless obedience in the sense of dull imitation; rather they demand particular interpretative practices and discussion between teacher and student in order to be realized. Through this, they are subject to ongoing interpretation – not through the deciphering of signs, but through previous performances of these particular rituals.

But in his attempt to safeguard the core of Judaism, Mendelssohn also holds that the essence of such laws must not change – which he sees as only possible, paradoxically, if they are practised by every individual in the particular way she understands them and is able to communicate them. On one hand, Mendelssohn holds that rituals need to be freely interpreted, and also that they should be handed down to the next generation from individual to individual. On the other hand, Mendelssohn argues for an unchanging core of Judaism, which happens to be embodied in the very same laws he otherwise relates to personal interpretation. What we are to do should remain unchanged, and by keeping the appropriate symbolic actions constant, the concepts connected to these actions will also be kept stable. The combination of such an individualistic interpretation with the aim of conserving the core of Judaism remains an unresolved problem.

So, we face the following interpretative puzzle: Mendelssohn wants scriptural interpretation to follow a universal and unchangeable set of rules, which owe their constancy and authority not to some fixed authority, but to an uninterrupted chain of interpreters, all bound together by cultural ties. The most important elements of such a chain are teacher and student of ritual – that is, the active members of a religious community. But where is the argument for the realizability of such a ‘law of laws’? The mere hope for an uninterrupted chain of subjects interpreting revelation through a shared practice of ritual seems to be just one side of the coin, since it does not sufficiently reflect the criterion of good interpretation as the appropriate uncovering of the spirit behind the ‘actions’. Furthermore, the romantically depicted relationship between teacher and student is in danger of becoming too static, thus threatening to turn performance into mere imitation. The teacher, after all, is the one ‘who should know best’ – and in Judaism, as in any other religious tradition, there is ample evidence for cases in which following a rule has been a response to authority, not to the best available reason or the awareness of some ‘truth’.

It is not enough simply to state Mendelssohn's seemingly paradoxical requirements for any ‘true’ understanding of religion, which should combine subjective and intersubjective, or individual and communal understanding, and hence secure both individual interpretation and fixed universal meaning of revealed religion. Rather we should develop a reasonable explanation of the structure of such a religious hermeneutics. Eisen tries to account for this by describing the mitzvoth (commandments) as a language, enabling a ‘conversation’ between Jews and between all Jews and their God.Footnote ²⁶ As mentioned above, Eisen's own arguments against the plausibility of Mendelssohn's theory of language speak against this explanation: it is Eisen's main point, after all, that the ongoing conversation which rests on the laws is still subject to the fallible interpretation of letters. I will argue, however, that Mendelssohn had better reasons for his theory, since it is the very nature of Jewish ritual, with its dialogical structure, that proves Judaism to be resilient against the dangers of misconstruing our cultural self-understanding.

Hilfrich points in a more fruitful direction when she characterizes ceremonial laws as ‘an exemplary system of resistance that keeps their users practically conscious of the inherent ambiguity of writing and of their own key role in its determination’.Footnote ²⁷ But it remains to be seen how this power of ‘resistance’ can emerge. What does the ‘key role’ of the practitioner mean? Perhaps we can improve her view of this ‘system of resistance’ in the following way. Since Mendelssohn provides us with a genealogy of the sign, and shows how it can be reified by a powerful and knowledgeable elite and used to manipulate others, he also offers a treatment of this evil by the simple reversion of this occurrence. Armed with knowledge about the ‘making’ of signs, an individual can insist on being shown what a particular sign actually means, and is thus empowered to understand – and criticize – it. Keeping in mind my previous reference to the continual learning process in Jewish ritual this becomes even clearer: in the conversation between scholar and student, the sign must become transparent as a means of transporting meaning through its discussion, and through an enhanced and shared knowledge of its historical roots. Thus, the ritual cannot be turned into an unquestionable and opaque order that the student is meant simply to follow.

In a similar vein, Freudenthal stresses the communal and continuous aspects of the performance of rituals. They help preserve our memory of those historical events that bore witness to religious revelation – without forcing the believer to solve each and any theological problem connected to these historical truths. ‘The Sabbath as a day of rest and its referent – God's rest after the creation of the world and the Exodus – hence belong to the core meaning of the ritual [signifying the beginning of Sabbath]; the theology of creation does not.’Footnote ²⁸ Apart from avoiding theoretical intricacies, the meaning of each ritual needs constant practice and has to be accompanied by the appropriate thoughts; it must be a lively exchange. Some rituals, for example at Passover, even mimic a dialogueFootnote ²⁹ to stress that the ritual is indeed part of an ongoing conversation. Of course, mimicry of dialogue does not by itself make the person performing the mimicry reflect on the content. But it may remind the practitioner to question the content of this dialogue. According to Freudenthal, this enables the performer to exercise these rituals ‘with the intention to fulfill them as religious acts’.Footnote ³⁰ Freudenthal, however, does not explain this effect, though in a section on ‘Subjective and objective fulfillment of the commandments’Footnote ³¹ he hints at an interesting aspect of intersubjectivity that can serve to clarify this issue. There, he discusses the fulfilment of a ritual such as circumcision. Even if the agent in the ritual, the Mohel, does not act with a religious intent as described above, he still – from an external viewpoint – enacts the appropriate actions. But has he really performed the ritual? As Mendelssohn emphasizes, there is no way of externally detecting a missing internal commitment, and therefore, ‘our presumption is that an action is what it seems to be’.Footnote ³² This criterion of a shared ‘presumption’ highlights how we are to understand ‘objectivity’ here: such a fulfilment can only be confirmed by others based on a web of intersubjectively shared praxis and thought. Thus, the meaning of any command, whether written or performed, can only come about by the assumption of a shared background, and it is never the individual alone who suffices to judge a ritual as having been adequately performed. The meaning of a divine command is determined by all who engage in the ritual.

However, there is still no argument in view that this ‘shared background’ helps preserve the essence of revealed religion. In fact quite the opposite: Freudenthal reads Mendelssohn's theory of religion as practice as an argument for the openness of such practices within Judaism, since it offers proper means to react to changes.Footnote ³³ The shared tradition of a community may put constraints on the understanding of its rituals, but it cannot exhaustively determine its development. Thus, ‘[i]t is better to observe unity of action and pluralism of interpretation’.Footnote ³⁴ It is yet unclear how far this pluralism can go. Since Mendelssohn also stresses that his faith means observance to a God who said, ‘Therefore, it is said: I am the Lord. My decree is upon you, and you are not allowed to evade [it]’,Footnote ³⁵ how can he allow for changes through interpretation, if not by divine command? The divine decree is to be fulfilled; the appropriate actions have to be done. Even further: if those actions are to be of the right kind, the appropriate intention is mandatory as well. It may be that humans cannot demand the correct conviction from one another, but apparently God can. Hence, the openness of interpretation cannot go too far. If Mendelssohn still insists on the untouchability of revelation,Footnote ³⁶ he needs to offer more satisfying criteria for their proper interpretation: how can we detect, behind revelation, God's actual will? We have to concede that Mendelssohn may ultimately drive out freedom of interpretation by smuggling in a dogmatic understanding of Judaism through the back door. Even if the individual remained the crucial actor and an important part of the realization of revealed religion, she is still bound to revealed laws as handed down by her teachers, unless otherwise instructed by her God (however that may happen). Thus, at the end of the argument for individual freedom of interpretation, orthodoxy, rather than dialogue, takes over again.

How could Mendelssohn solve this paradox of freedom and revealed religion – a thinker who may have been a pragmatic ‘pluralist to the core’,Footnote ³⁷ but who was definitely not in favour of an encompassing ‘world religion’, which for him only meant another form of hidden suppression of his people?Footnote ³⁸ If called into question, it is freedom that would have to resign and let religion take the helm. Thus, the idea of change within religion needs an appropriate philosophical framework in order to prevent the enlightened aspects of Mendelssohn's theory collapsing. If we stick to the Mendelssohnian idea of ritual as language, and stress its constitutive force for human self-formation, the question of the appropriate realization of such self-formation – without colliding with a fixed and authoritative divine will – is still at stake.

Intersubjective understanding: the second-person perspective in Cassirer's account of religion

To summarize the positive results of my investigation thus far: according to Mendelssohn, ceremonial laws are only realized when authentically performed and interpersonally shared, resting on the believer's own interpretation, but also dependent on their understanding in the believer's community. Moreover, the performance of religious ritual shows the interplay of universal demands and individual understanding, thereby enabling the individual to give herself and her world a definite, non-solipsistic shape, while still being capable of coping with and effectuating changes within the religious system. To put it in Freudenthal's terms, the critical potential of ritual evades the dangers of idolatry.

In this section, I want to discuss how this freedom of interpretation might be reconciled with constraints on an adequate interpretation of a supposedly fixed essence of revealed religion. I intend to show that Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms can help us to refine this crucial part of Mendelssohn's concept of ritual. I will, however, not be able to ‘save’ Mendelssohn's account fully, but I will try to explain why a complete salvation may not even be desirable. With the help of Cassirer's theory we can better understand how a good religious hermeneutics prevents the interpretation of rituals from turning into mere idiosyncratic opinion. Ultimately, there has to be change within our understanding of a revealed religion, but this change takes place within a determinable framework: a living community. Cassirer reflects on the inherent dialogical structure that saves Jewish rituals from pure dogmatism and allows them to function as ethical standards. Let me explain how these ethical standards function within the aforementioned framework of a living community.

Cassirer – like MendelssohnFootnote ³⁹ – claims that all human life and culture is structured symbolically. He calls the functions of such structures ‘symbolic forms’, which, in turn, must be seen as the very conditions of human culture itself. We can only appropriately grasp humanity – and human self-understanding, accordingly – if we understand these symbolic ways of interaction. One prominent symbolic form is religion.

In his Essay on Man (1944), Cassirer deals with myth and religion in one and the same chapter.Footnote ⁴⁰ But in this work, as well as in the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Mythical Thought (1925), and in The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942), Cassirer also draws an important distinction between ‘primitive’ (i.e. ‘mythological’) and ‘advanced’ monotheistic religions: the latter, he suggests, contain a new drive behind the formation of human thoughts about the origin and meaning of the world. In the same way as myth, religion is concerned with the relation between man and nature. But whereas in myth humans are subject to the forces of nature, in religion they view nature through a particularly ‘human eye’. This does not mean, however, that religious human beings treat nature scientifically, in that nature becomes the object of human manipulation. Instead, in monotheistic religions the expressive impact of the mythical imagination of nature as a ruling power, or the universal sympathy of all things, is replaced by the representation of the ruling power of a personalized moral will. This opens up a new perspective, in which we are separated from the forces or laws of nature, and face the normative requirements of a God. This God calls for individual reaction. I come to see myself as an individual faced not only with the powers of nature as well as with the wills of other individuals, but also as being addressed by the will of a God, representing something ‘higher’ than, or ‘beyond’, mere nature.

Most importantly for Cassirer, monotheistic religions such as Judaism mark the emergence of a new ethical consciousness. Even though he states in his late essay ‘Judaism and the modern political myths’ (1944)Footnote ⁴¹ that sticking to strict religious rituals is a leftover from myth, thus seemingly negating the Mendelssohnian view of the indispensability of rituals, it is the emphasis on strict observance of those rituals that gives us a hint: there must be a difference between strictly mimicked rites, and those which are performed, in Mendelssohn's sense. What does this mean, and how does this lead to an ‘ethical consciousness’? In mythical thinking, rituals present morality and custom (Sitte und Brauch) as objective powers, rather than emerging from autonomous decisions of the actors. Thus, mythical consciousness is a shared consciousness pertaining to a group, not an individual; moreover, this group is seen as an objective, unchanging entity. Enacting mythical rites, accordingly, is a means to living this communal feeling; it is not in need of individual interpretation, nor subject to individually initiated change.Footnote ⁴² Cassirer also argues that within the mythical state of mind, rituals refer to emotions rather than to (intellectual) ideas; they are emotional ‘tendencies … translated into movements’.Footnote ⁴³ Performing these movements gives a feeling of power and control,Footnote ⁴⁴ and also a notion of unity between the performer, the gods, and fellow believers. The act is performed to cause something to happen – it is magic. In contrast, a religious ritual is performed as an inner preparation for something to happen – which includes the explicit awareness that the event itself is not under our control. This acceptance of a division between the agent, the act, and the effect marks the transition from the mythical to the religious function of rituals. The performance of religious rituals is a means to address our wishes and ideas rather than (superstitiously) assuming that we had any magical power to realize them. It thus offers a constructive way to cope with a given situation, but at the same time strengthens our awareness of our overall limitations.

For Judaism in particular, Cassirer further interprets rituals not primarily as given orders of behaviour confining the individual will, but as intrinsically related to ‘new and higher ethical standards’,Footnote ⁴⁵ based on the believers’ own consciousness. The overall move from myth to religion is thus most fully reflected by characterizing religious rituals according to their ‘inner tendency’,Footnote ⁴⁶ which represents an ethical demand. This ethical demand, in turn, is reflected in a new conception of agency and time in religion as compared to myth.

Cassirer, confusingly enough, illustrates the religious conception of agency with the mythical concept of taboo, which, even in early Semitic religions, was seen as a mere physical impurity.Footnote ⁴⁷ One could say – once more turning Cassirer's view against Mendelssohn's – that the laws of purity in Judaism are also just forms of taboo. This would exclude Judaism from the religious conception of agency, but render it a late form of myth. Nevertheless, Cassirer is very clear that the important shift from myth to religion is precisely marked by the awakening of individual responsibility contained in the Judaic understanding of taboo. The respective rituals expressing these taboos now address a common trait of humanity that resides within each individual, that is, within each actor herself. The laws about kosher food, for example, may still carry some mythical relics. But in the framework of Judaism, they take on a new role, now connected to individual intention and responsibility, rather than the physical purity of a people. In Judaism, according to Cassirer's view, ‘[t]he only purity that has a religious significance is purity of the heart’.Footnote ⁴⁸ In other words, the shift from myth towards religion is reflected in the ability of such religious laws not merely to prohibit certain actions (as mythical taboo does) and thus only shape our external behaviour, but rather to enable a spiritual or internal attitude that should form a concept of appropriate agency.

This new understanding of ritual as an expression of my attitude also comes with a particular direction in time: religious time, so to speak, moves forward, whereas mythical time stands still. As Cassirer stresses in his second book of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,Footnote ⁴⁹ the concept of creatio ex nihilo, of the sheer beginning of time as such and its relation to our finitude, gives rise to religion proper in that it calls for a differentiation between myself (or even ourselves) and this other being which is capable of such a creation. Both of these types of beings, the limited and the eternal, are not only factors of this outlook into the future, but also gain an independent persona. As for other limited beings like myself, Cassirer claims that ‘[o]ut of the ethical-prophetic idea of the future grows a true discovery of man's individuality, of his personal self’,Footnote ⁵⁰ in that the individual experiences herself as being actively involved in the shaping of this future. As for the eternal being, Judaism gives us the straightforward claim of its personality: ‘And God said unto Moses: I Am That I AM.’Footnote ⁵¹ It is this being to whom we owe personal responsibility.

A religion performed within this new framework – and in accordance with Mendelssohn's understanding of ritual – is then not a mythical subjugation under an a-rational force of nature. It is rather the expression of one's personal relation to the divine, or, of the ethical demand of faith. The expression of individual devotion in Judaism does not mean blind submission, but instead means the active acquisition of an ethical-religious understanding of the ‘order of the world’, which includes the individual as a free agent, whose actions should be (but are not automatically) guided by the requirements of divine law.

Finally, we find a similarly ‘individualistic’ account of religion in Cassirer's view when compared to Mendelssohn's. As Cassirer puts it, we may hold that:

Cassirer goes even further: whatever is realized in the soul of an individual is per se not an eternally unchangeable object, but her own ‘work’.Footnote ⁵³ The fixation of a religious idea into a story, a prophecy, or its representation in a ritual, converts an inward idea into something tangible, thereby into something that can be shared. Such a ‘work’, however, is not fixed once and for all. It rather functions like an organism: it is brought back to life whenever another individual encounters and enacts it. In his Logic of the Cultural Sciences Cassirer explicitly names as the final end of any ‘work’ not the mere embodiment, but its addressee, the ‘you, the other subject’. Thus, ‘works’ are not essentially material, but rather the ‘expression of something spiritual [Ausdruck eines Geistigen], which – if it comes upon related and receptive subjects [verwandte und empfängliche Subjekte] – could at any time be freed from its material covering [Hülle] and awakened to new effectiveness [Wirkung]’.Footnote ⁵⁴

According to Cassirer, the individual encounters her own religion in a similar way as one encounters works of art, monuments of a genius, or remnants of a person in history – for example in the ‘works’ of the prophets. In good hermeneutic tradition, Cassirer calls this encounter ‘feeling oneself into’ (Einfühlung).Footnote ⁵⁵ Emphasizing the hermeneutic attitude he also addresses the intersubjective aspect of change in religion: with every person taking part in keeping the religious ‘work’ alive, the number of interpreters grows, and so does the amount of interpretations. All religious ‘works’ are realized only through understanding them here and now. Cassirer diagnoses this as the basis of scriptural ‘work’ in general. Just as ‘there is perhaps no individual act of speaking that has not in some way influenced “the” language’,Footnote ⁵⁶ there is also no individual act of interpretation which does not change the interpreted content. Let us draw this parallel between change in our understanding of ritual and Cassirer's argument for the formation of and change in language a bit further.

As Cassirer also stresses in the Logic of the Cultural Sciences, language itself should not be understood as a ‘given’ entity, but as an ever-changing, active mode of world-construction. Language is not a tool that the members of a society simply use, or in whose usage they just participate. Instead, Cassirer speaks of a ‘reciprocal relation’ (Wechselbestimmung) in which individuals use and reshape their language, as they are changed themselves by the other language-users around them. Language can only mean something if it has a certain ‘objective’ pattern – that is, if its symbols are essentially shared symbols. To function this way, language needs to be used by participants addressing each other. ‘Objective’ structures of language, then, turn out to be ‘intersubjective’: the sphere of meaning is situated not in the third-person, but in the first- and second-person perspective.Footnote ⁵⁷ Additionally, language is not a tool applied to something ‘given’, but is involved in the very process of ‘creating’ this givenness: ‘The act of speaking is never in this sense an act of mere appropriation [Aneignung]; rather, it is, no matter how minuscule, a creative act: an act of shaping and reshaping.’Footnote ⁵⁸ As language proves decisive for our thinking and our perception, it becomes ‘the distinctive mark of man …; it is anthropocentric in its very essence and nature’.Footnote ⁵⁹

Religious language goes further, in that it serves to mark the difference between humankind and the divine. It is marked by the intellectualization of reality through a specific form of symbolic representation. Whereas myth, as we saw above, does not allow for any difference between the self and the world, or between causal (or rational) and magical thinking, religion is marked by an awareness of the difference between a sign and what it signifies. With this, religion enhances the individual's awareness of herself as different from the world perceived as well as from any transcendent realm beyond it.Footnote ⁶⁰ Religious symbols have a content that has to be grasped through symbolical practice. It is an essential aspect of religious symbols, according to Cassirer, that the deciphering of the symbol cannot be exhausted by mere reference to the visible world. Strictly speaking, the content of religious symbols is ineffable. It is, rather, meant to evoke an awareness of something spiritual that is situated beyond the given world, to which the individual has access not through worldly objects, nor just through the sign itself, but through her own imagination. Following Cassirer, religion should be understood as a world-view in which our human, symbolic perspective is crucial, and where the expression of this perspective is the only way to realize the ‘gap’ between us, the world, and the ‘spiritual’ beyond this world. Religious rituals, then, need to be transparent with respect to their intermediary and representative role. If we now look at Mendelssohn's main point through the lens of Cassirer's theory of religious language, we get the following picture: religious rituals as the ‘works’, or the language of Judaism, refer to the divine, but are not the divine itself. To perform them means to enliven them, recreating the same essence through our own interpretation. They can be seen as a human means of grasping the divine through interaction.

Conclusion: creating ourselves by understanding our history

With Cassirer's theory of religious practice we might even speak of a hermeneutics of self-formation through religious ritual. Any interpretation in religious ritual is tied up in two relationships. First, it is reliant on the relation between the signs themselves and their user, who is not only the point of full realization of their inherent meaning, but is also shaped by what they represent. Second, religious ritual needs intersubjective comprehension. Self-formation thus construed is never a solitary endeavour: the practice of religion is a reciprocal process. The process of comprehension and self-formation cannot be adequately understood as a linear relation between the performer of the ritual and her God. Rather, the symbolic forms of ritual need to be intersubjectively communicated. Thus, the performance of religious ritual as a particular form of religious ‘language’ can be seen as ‘the outgrowth of a social act’.Footnote ⁶¹

In the above-mentioned essay on Judaism and modern myths, Cassirer argues for a purification – or modification – of rituals in an ethical sense, thus pointing towards a ‘social’ understanding of symbolic forms. The awareness of ‘individual responsibility’ defines the individual's new role as an ethical subject within Judaism.Footnote ⁶² Hence, being aware of the binding force of the law entails being aware of other free subjects with similar religious ties. Having faith, then, means, on one hand, that I understand myself as autonomously bound by a divine law, and, on the other, that my self-understanding is closely intertwined with the respective self-understanding of other subjects.

Through this hermeneutic process of self-formation we not only comprehend the world and ourselves, but we also obtain a history. With reference to the function of ‘works’, we may specify this with Michael Friedman as follows:

By means of rituals as such ‘cultural objects’, then, religion is established through its constant reinterpretation. Its essence is not set in what Scripture says, but exists only by being constantly re-enacted. Like Mendelssohn, Cassirer argues that the individual needs to realize actively these defining historical truths. By practising ceremonies Jews instantiate their particular historical truth. Their religion is not a state of being, but rather a particular kind of action that enables the formation of an identity. In light of this, we can reconstruct a Mendelssohnian hermeneutics of the ceremonial laws as a tool for self-understanding and self-esteem.

The central ‘anthropological’ premise of hermeneutics is, according to Dilthey, that human beings are ‘creatures of time’, which recalls Mendelssohn's definition of a human being as ‘an incessant temporality’ (ein unaufhörliches Zeitliches),Footnote ⁶⁴ enriched by the social mode of humans sharing a culture. Despite their supposedly sacred origin, traditions, rituals, and ceremonies are ultimately nothing more than what people make of them. In this respect, Mendelssohn agrees with Spinoza's pragmatic understanding of language: words obtain their meaning through usage.Footnote ⁶⁵ There is nothing intrinsically sacred in words; they shall not be adored and idolized. But the spirit embodied in the ceremonial laws can rightfully become sacred through the role individuals performatively assign to them. Accordingly, the essence of such a Mendelssohnian understanding of religious self-formation is hermeneutical: the individual builds her own faith within the tension between her own understanding of herself and the laws directed to her. This hermeneutics not only deals with the conditions of the individual's understanding of religious revelation as given in Scripture. It is also about the relationship between individual understanding and its communicability to others, since these others embody Scripture in their very own way, just as the individual does. The binding force of the law is twofold: towards the individual's relation to her God, and towards her community. A truly enlightened society builds on the mutual awareness and communicability of these individual interpretations, but also needs to acknowledge the indispensability of the various cultural traditions formed therewith.

With Cassirer's theory of the transition from an all-encompassing and ultimately assimilating mythical expression to the individualizing mode of representation in religious ritual, we finally get a finer picture of how understanding of one's religious ties enables the individual to obtain a sense of ethical responsibility towards a higher being and her own culture. Only this densely knit web of cultural obligations and dependencies can account for the stability of a religious creed. So in the end we have answered Mendelssohn's attempt to save the ‘truth’ of his (or rather: any) religion in the negative: this truth can only be preserved in the dynamic exchange of performed convictions among the members of a community, and is thus in itself subject to change. The essence of religion, so to speak, is change. However, this ‘negative’ result can be transformed into a positive one: the establishment of faith is performed by individuals in dialogue, and it can only be performed by authentic selves, as they are established in a process of becoming aware of themselves as agents in, and contributors to, a shared culture. Our understanding of rituals is never purely subjective, but rests on our mutual attempts to grasp them. A re-reading of Mendelssohn's claims through the lens of Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms thus accounts for intersubjective engagement in religious rituals as a fundamental form of religious expression, which in turn helps us better understand how human beings build up an intersubjective network of ‘cultural meanings’; a world in which we can access an authentic understanding of our cultural and religious ties.Footnote ⁶⁶