The way of the world

"We turn our attention to the 'world', in the sense in which Nietzsche (in 'The Gay Science', [sec.]108) contrasts 'the astral order in which we live' as opposed to 'the total character of the world' which is, he tells us, 'in all eternity - chaos'. For Cassirer, the function of the symbol was to give form and thus, ultimately, to give birth to the world; as he puts it in volume 1 of 'The Philosophy of Symbolic forms', we must seek to understand how, in 'the function of linguistic thinking, the function of mythical and religious thinking, and the function of artistic perception', we attain 'an entirely determinate formulation, not exactly of the world, but rather making for the world' - 'eine ganz bestimmte Gestaltung nicht sowohl der Welt, als vielmehr eine Gestaltung zur Welt'. And yet the world has, as the title of a famous Restoration comedy puts it, its 'ways'; after they have created it, e ven the symbol forms inhabit a specific politico-cultural context. To put it another way: how does one negotiate the 'symbolic forms' and the bureaucratic world of application forms? The volume is offered as a Festschrift for Roger Stephenson, who recently retired from the William Jacks Cha