抄録
Although Ernst Cassirer’s concern is primarily focused on epistemology, he
wrote several texts on the history of ethics（especially classical German ethics）.
He also emphasizes that ethics plays a central role in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy,
a philosopher whom he greatly respected. Furthermore, the later Cassirer─as a Jew in exile from Nazi Germany─came to assert that a new construction of
ethics that can be effective against real social problems is an inevitable philosophical
task for his day. However, he did not produce any work explicating his
own system of ethics. Why? Beginning with this question, I demonstrate that
Cassirer, nevertheless, laid the fundamental foundation of his（unwritten）ethics
by widening the application field of Kantian “moral freedom” and that this
foundation can be formulated as follows: in order to combat mythical consciousness（
symbolic form）, which is the only ethical（and social）danger in human
life, man must use and promote other kinds of consciousness（symbolic form）,
such as religious, artistic, linguistic, or scientific consciousness. I then point out
some possible problems with this ethical foundation such as the inconsistent
variation in his explanations of mythical consciousness in order to directly and
exclusively relate the danger of this consciousness to the problems of Nazi Germany;
the optimistic view that all types of human consciousness, except for
mythical, are morally good; and the lack of serious consideration for actual and
concrete social problems or biological and animal elements in human life. Finally,
I indicate that what we could learn from these（possible）problems and Cassirer’s
attitude toward ethics is, broadly speaking, as follows: we should remind
ourselves that one of philosophy’s key tasks is to construct ethics that is effective
against real social problems; furthermore, it would not be easy to satisfactorily
fulfill this task if one is not prepared in advance or does not take into
consideration the real and concrete lives and tangible problems of human existence
seriously.
