The decisive occasion for the following paper was the discovery, during the editorial work, of the expression “symbolische Ideation” (symbolic ideation) in theposthumous manuscript of Ernst Cassirer, “Prägnanz, symbolische Ideation”. The occurrence of this expression raises one more time the question of the relation between Cassirer and the system of concepts of Husserl’s phenomenology. The present research gets to the conclusion that Cassirer uses the concept of “symbolische Ideation” (symbolic ideation) in a sense which basically expresses his own philosophical position, rather than Husserl’s, who links the “symbolische Ideation” with the term “Ideation”, meaning the unmediated self-giveness of the General, of the Identical. But still, one can also discover some common points between Cassirer and Husserl.

In order to answer the question formulated in the title, we firstly need to point out some theoretical constraints. A lot of parallels allow us to speak about a‘philosophy of symbolic structures’ or, better, about a ‘philosophy of structural symbolic systems’ in Lévi-Strauss theory. This is possible only if we establish an equivalence between the concepts ‘Form’ and ‘Structure,’ as they are used by Lévi-Strauss and Cassirer. The orientation of this implicit philosophy of Lévi-Strauss is not that of a philosophy of culture based on a philosophical-anthropological reflection (as it is the case with Cassirer), but a scientific research of concrete primitive societies, together with their empirical cultures and their unconscious, hidden laws of formation.