Ernst Cassirer: What I Take

Cassirer quotes Aristotle, "Man wants to know." But there are two objects: himself and nature. For Cassirer, culture is the intersection of the two. We cannot suppose an ideal human, he says: we must look at a real one. Nature's unique "symbolizing animal" gives rise to culture and survives by cultural means. The empirical "theory of man," as Cassirer calls it, must be a cultural theory.

Following Cassirer into this landscape is easy enough while the terrain remains empirical. The physical world is a closed system, made of energies and forces, such that even its changes are law-like and describable in terms of cause and effect. It yields to empirical methods. But the cultural animal builds a cultural world to deal with the physical one. That world is an open system, made of ambitions — erratic, constantly under construction, perpetually unfinished. Empiricism still holds, up to a point, but scientific laws or models for ever-changing ambitions do not — probably cannot — exist. What can one do with this object called culture then, once empirical observation is exhausted, yet half of it remains undescribed?

Empirically speaking, cultural facts do not exist as laws of nature do. Nature is fixed, while the "nature" of an idea in a culture may change (in light of new attitudes, for instance). A Renaissance artwork differs from a medieval one; feudalism differs from democracy; customs differ from place to place. Unlike the physical world, which requires only observation and proper scientific modeling to understand, the cultural dimensions of human life are subject to reinterpretation — and even reinvention — continually.

This does not make scientific knowledge more valid than cultural knowledge. Both inform the human being. But the physical and cultural domains contain different types of facts, require different forms of observation, and therefore call for different types of analysis. A relevant metaphor: if a patient has chronic headaches, the physician must determine, before all else, whether the illness is somatic or psychosomatic, to solve the problem. The scientific domain is somatic, while the cultural domain is psychosomatic, so to speak. The two may interact and overlap, but still they are two domains.

Science improves itself continually, but its test of validity is constant: description of a process is plausible until falsified by observation. Empiricism is its mode of operation, and observation determines validity. Since any observation (or theory) might be mistaken, the safety net for validity in science is intersubjectivity: cooperative reobservation. There is a metaphysical assumption involved: that repeated intersubjective re-evaluation eventually will yield validity (poetically known as "certainty").*

*Hume reduced certainty to "mere belief," but that is sufficient to proceed — belief is peer reviewed, so to speak — thus his skepticism is not fatal to science.

In the cultural domain, the situation is somewhat different — but not impossible to describe. There is no such thing as a "valid" culture regardless of the number of observations, so a set of valid "laws of culture," setting out causes and effects of operation are probably not worth pursuing. Nonetheless "culture" is empirically definable, there are universal features above its variations, and there are theories of history, art, politics, and ethics (for instance) with methods and approaches to subject matter of their own. As long as these do not flatly contradict scientific knowledge, their methods can be as valid intersubjectively as any proposed hypothesis in science — with one proviso: cultures evolve, such that stability of interpretation (poetically known as "certainty") cannot be considered a goal of cultural inquiry.

Where the scientific goal is certainty in knowledge of the physical world, the goal of inquiry in the cultural domain is to understand how we construct our internal world: especially our ideas of being human. Aside from the anatomy of the brain which allows us to think in the first place, knowledge of our invented world — the product of our thought — is never certain or complete because its target does not stand still.

Products of culture (including scientific practice) must be reinterpreted in the idiom of every age. For example, Enlightenment thought will be re-evaluated many times in coming generations. Today's assessments differ from how the Enlightenment saw itself, and tomorrow's views will differ from today's. We should expect these shifts — embrace them, even — as part of the evolution of our culture. Every culture has its own such historical concerns.

Another example might amplify the point. Despite the overworked aphorism that philosophy is "a series of footnotes to Plato," it is also true that every era invents its own version of Socrates, much beyond Plato's view. This does not change the man himself, of course, but it does change the light on his pedestal. We use his image for our own purposes in every generation.

Such exercises in reinterpretation reflect the nature of the cultural domain: it is fluid, and follows the contours of the age — in fact, for practical purposes, the contour is the domain.

That observation leads directly to the point that culture is a process — neverending. Observable in human evolution and reinforced by history, cultural processes can be discussed as empirically as any science. In the meantime the empirical facts of human nature must be considered first, to illuminate as much of the cultural process as possible before we critique its products.