μῦθος, mythos (story), 6 [BTJS]
xi. Ernst Cassirer has recently made the Dasein of myth a theme for philosophical Interpretation. (See his Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, vol. II, Das mythische Denken, 1925.) In this study, clues of far-reaching importance are made available for ethnological research. From the standpoint of philosophical problematics it remains an open question whether the foundations of this Interpretation are sufficiently transparent – whether in particular the architectonics and the general systematic content of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason can provide a possible design for such a task, or whether a new and more primordial approach may not here be needed. That Cassirer himself sees the possibility of such a task is shown by his note on pp. 16 ff., where he alludes to the phenomenological horizons disclosed by Husserl. In a discussion between the author and Cassirer on the occasion of a lecture before the Hamburg section of the Kantgesellschaft in December 1923 on ‘Tasks and Pathways of Phenomenological Research’, it was already apparent that we agreed in demanding an existential analytic such as was sketched in that lecture. [BTMR]