An Essay on Man, in which Ernst Cassirer distills his lifetime of work in cultural theory and science history, was published 1944 — 70 years ago. His last major book, it is the best starting point for readers unfamiliar with his cultural "theory of man" — especially notable for its scientifically informed approach to human nature.
Today there is much more science to inform an anthropological philosophy, as he called it. In particular, the science most dedicated to culture — anthropology itself — has developed in Cassirer's direction so much, it might have outrun him by now. The time has come to consider more facts and possibly improve on his arguments. This would not diminish him. Having placed the science(s) of humanity at the heart of his philosophy of humanity, over time Cassirer will count as one of those giants on whose shoulders many other thinkers stand.
Here are two excerpts which have electrified me for at least two decades, and always will.
[A more personal discussion: Cassirer's Influence" in "Nuked at Six"]
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An Essay on Man
from Ch 6: The definition of man in terms of human culture
[To approach] self-examination and self-knowledge, Socrates had approached the individual man. Plato recognized the limitations of the Socratic way of inquiry. In order to solve the problem [what is man], he declared, we must project it upon a larger plan. ... Man is to be studied not in his individual life, but in his political and social life. ... Philosophy cannot give us a satisfactory theory of man until it has developed a theory of the state. ...
But political life is not the only form of communal human existence. In the history of mankind, the state is a late product of the civilizing process. Long before man had discovered this form of social organization he had made other attempts to organize his feelings, desires and thoughts ... in language, in myth, in religion and in art. We must accept this broader basis if we wish to develop a theory of man. The state, however important, is not all. It cannot express ... all the other activities of man. ...
Man's outstanding characteristic ... is not his metaphysical or physical nature -- but his work. It is this work, it is the system of human activities, which defines the circle of "humanity." Language, myth, religion, art, science, history are ... the various sectors of this circle. ... It is the basic function of speech, of myth, of art [etc] that we must seek ... [and] trace back to a common origin."
After discussing the possibilities and shortcomings of various theories, Cassirer presents the concept of "culture" as the only envelope in which all the activities and works of human beings can fit.
In the decades since he wrote this, science has revealed that culture is not just something explanatory about humans, it is in fact constitutive of humans: we evolved as cultural beings. Culture is the evolutionary strategy of our species: our niche. It is not merely something we do, it's what we are. Our brain is a cultural brain; culture is our form and our function.
In the decades since he wrote this, science has revealed that culture is not just something explanatory about humans, it is in fact constitutive of humans: we evolved as cultural beings. Culture is the evolutionary strategy of our species: our niche. It is not merely something we do, it's what we are. Our brain is a cultural brain; culture is our form and our function.
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An Essay On Man
from Ch 1: The crisis in man's knowledge of himself
Everywhere in the science of the nineteenth century we meet with the triumphal march of new mathematical ideas and concepts. ...[But] the innovation of the intellectual structure of the nineteenth century lies in the [descending] place that mathematical thought occupies in the scientific heirarchy. A new force begins to appear. Biological thought takes precedence over mathematical thought. ...
[There] are still some metaphysicians ... who cherish the hope of founding a mathematical psychology. But these projects rapidly disappear after the publication of Darwin's work On the Origin of Species. Henceforth the true character of anthropological philosophy appears to be fixed once and for all .... for we are not in search of a general definition of ... the essence of man. Our problem is simply to collect the empirical evidence which the general theory of evolution has put at our disposal....
Darwin's work was to free modern thought from [its] illusion of final causes [ie Aristotelian teleology]. We must seek to understand the structure of organic nature by material causes alone, or we cannot understand it at all. ...The accidental changes that take place in the life of every organism are sufficient to explain the gradual transformation ... from the simplest forms of life ... to the highest. ...
Herewith a new problem presented itself to all philosophers whose starting point was the general theory of evolution. They had to prove that the cultural world, the world of human civilization, is reducible to a few general causes which are the same for the physical as for the so-called spiritual phenomena [of man]. ...The same iron ring of necessity ... encloses both our physical and our cultural life. ... We [should be able to] consider man as ... a species which produces philosophies and poems in the same way silkworms produce their cocoons ...
[Yet] each individual thinker gives us his own picture of human nature. All these philosophers are determined empiricists. ... Nietzsche proclaims the will to power, Freud signalizes the sexual instinct, Marx enthrones the economic instinct. Each theory becomes a Procrustean bed on which the empirical facts are stretched to fit a preconceived pattern.
Owing to this development, our modern theory of man lost its intellectual center. We acquired instead a complete anarchy of thought. ...Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists all approached the problem [what is man] from their own viewpoints. ...
[This] antagonism of ideas is not merely a grave theoretical problem but an imminent threat to the whole extent of our ethical and cultural life .... [Our] wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of thoughts. Unless we succeed in finding a clue ... to lead us out of this labyrinth, we can have no real insight into the general character of human culture; we shall remain lost ..."
Cassirer then orients the reader to his previous master work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, which for present purposes can be stated as the theory that the key to the nature of the human species is symbolic manipulation of the world and this "symbolizing animal" directly gives rise to culture.
I always thought there was a strand of idealism (or dualism) in your thinking, and perhaps it can be traced to Cassirer. I'll have another look at him, but I had dismissed him in the past as not being a modern scientific thinker. In particular, his notion of symbolic forms seems to owe something to the tradition of German idealism.
ReplyDeleteBut his view of humans as cultural animals is spot on.
Yes he is a major force in neo-Kantianism, so he belongs to the German Idealist tradition, which is a major downside in my opinion. I take that element with a whole shakerful of salt.
ReplyDeleteI knew you'd say something about dualism soon as I finished the first draft. "Oh boy, here it comes." LOL. But I am not a dualist. For me there is no mind/body distinction (per the strict definition of dualism). Consciousness and self and "will" and all of that arise directly from the physical being. But as soon as we get to language, we are in the domain not of "thought," which is entirely physical (or it could not occur), but of the products of language (and the reason it exists in the first place): ie, the ideas we create and share to discuss the world among ourselves (such as how to make bows and arrows). There the social creature becomes the cultural creature -- inventing and communicating invention, including eg. inventing civilization. I dont think it's dualistic to see such content as non-physical (except that memory is physical, so transmitting or communicating inventions does have a physical analog somewhere at all times.
The title of the first post on Cassirer had been troubling me before you made this comment, and now even more. What Cassirer taught, and what he taught me (ie, what I learned from him) are different things. He's after some phenomenology and I'm not. He is a science historian, but not a scientist. The post should really be titled something like "what I took from Cassirer." How I raided his warchest.
Delete> Consciousness and self and "will" and all of that arise directly from the physical being. But as soon as we get to language, we are in the domain not of "thought," which is entirely physical (or it could not occur), but of the products of language (and the reason it exists in the first place): ie, the ideas we create and share to discuss the world among ourselves (such as how to make bows and arrows). There the social creature becomes the cultural creature -- inventing and communicating invention, including eg. inventing civilization. <
ReplyDeleteBut, as you yourself have pointed out, language-and-culture is our creator as well as our creation. So the human individual is dependent on culture for his very existence as a thinking being. It's all one fabric, in other words.
The way you describe the products of thinking reminds me of Popper's 'World 3'. I'm not saying it's necessarily a mistaken view or necessarily implies some form of dualism or idealism. But Popper did explicitly embrace Cartesian dualism.
It's all one fabric. We are evolved as a linguistic, technological, and group organized species.
ReplyDeleteI guess another way to put the example is, the brain is wired for language, but it's not wired for Russian. Nature and nurture ...
ReplyDelete"In the decades since he wrote this, science has revealed that culture is not just something explanatory about humans, it is in fact constitutive of humans: we evolved as cultural beings. Culture is the evolutionary strategy of our species: our niche. It is not merely something we do, it's what we are. Our brain is a cultural brain; culture is our form and our function."
ReplyDeleteYes, emphatically. E.O. Wilson's recent Social Conquest of Earth fully vindicates the claim that we have evolved as social creatures. Indeed, it is our social (or, eusocial) nature that has enabled a savannah ape to walk on the moon. Ridley documents the importance of exchange--trade--in this process. Society and trade require emotional features that allow reciprocal altruism, which is the origin of our moral feelings. Groups that cooperate internally out-compete groups that do not. Wilson (in particular) shows that group selection is a real phenomenon, despite the academic orthodoxy the other way, and characterizes our selection pressures as multi-level. Language, religion, and art all figure in the social equation, and the propensity for culture is thus also subject to selection.
I'm aware of EO Wilson's book, glad you're on that page.
DeleteI am careful not to say "social" when I mean "cultural" as the fundamental nature of humanity. Many species are social. Culture is our differentiator. So my formal picture of human nature is a cultural being, built on top of a social being. This allows me to account for various observations in which the limits of our cultural intelligence might be influenced by the more "wired in" (selected) limits of our social intelligence. Xenophobia seems to be built into the social creature to some extent, but it hampers our development of modern global culture, for instance. Illustrating why my thought is actually much deeper than EO Wilson's on several points -- LOL, all of that thanks to the extra depth provided by my exposure to Cassirer.
Evidently you like this series (A Natural Meta-ethics, above). Yes?