Cassirer and Impersonalism

As has already been pointed out, as meticulous as Cassirer's semiogenealogy is, it loses track of the most primitive characteristic of Language, its presumed efficacy, i. e. he fails to pursue the link between magic words, etc. and prescriptive language. As a result he offers no account of the emergence of descriptive language. Another, perhaps related, lacuna in his studies is the transition from personal to impersonal Language and Knowledge. As he recounts it, the most primitive experience is of the expressive 'thou', e. g. the face of a parent, the manifest anger of a god, on the basis of which he can explain the emergence of a rudimentary 'I' Knowledge and Language. But, his further assertion that the consciousness of a 'he' also appears at about the same stage, is presented with no derivation, and, soon, equally suddenly appearing in his account is the consciousness of an 'it'. Subsequently, now given the impersonal 'it', the seamlessness of the development of theoretical Knowledge and Language is relatively easy for Cassirer to show. But, both lacunae only contribute to the widespread priority, in theories of both Knowledge and Language, enjoyed by Fact and Descriptivity over Value and Prescriptivity, even to the extent that some theorists exclude the latter from the scope of Philosophy. While Cassirer is, unlike many of them, no Positivist or Analytic Philosopher, he often seems to share their priorities.