Reading from _An Essay on Man_(Cassirer) 001

_An Essay on Man_, Cassirer. Bantam Books, NY, January 1970.

Part I: What is Man?

Chapter I: The Crisis in Man's Knowledge of Himself.

Section 1, pp. 1 – 6.

In _An Essay on Man_, Cassirer offers a great deal of guidance that is relevant to our times. Indeed, the recent renaissance of Cassirer studies seems to have occurred precisely because a restatement and deeper understanding of his humanism is desperately needed. I hope to contribute in some small way to this reaffirmation of the importance of his philosophical project with this reading by alternately summarizing the text and relating Cassirer's argument to my understanding of present cultural conditions. As far as is possible, my comments will be separated from the summary by appearing in italics.

Cassirer begins with a statement of the generally acknowledged importance of the pursuit of self-knowledge as a guiding philosophical principle. I fear that this may no longer be the case, as this impulse has been degraded into a trivial form of self-awareness that seeks to be a perpetual state of self-congratulation. Our economics and our politics in particular appear to be degenerating into systems for elevating the most aggressively arrogant people over and above the rest of us as “winners”. This spiritual deterioration contributes to “the crisis in man's knowledge of himself” by denying us the objectivity and sense of reality that is functionally established through legitimate economic and political expression (I use the term “expression” in a wider sense than Cassirer's technical employment of it in order to make his concept of the active, spontaneous and creative nature of economic, political and all other cultural activity a bit more accessible). The postulation of sufficiency or enough, which is the fundamental determination of economic thought and action, is impossible in a culture that understands economic objectivity as sort of material fullness that must be constantly augmented in order to maintain a sense of saturation (sufficiency can also mean abundance and plenty as well as enough). As Epicurus said, “nothing is enough for the man to whom enough is too little”, and this attitude necessarily involves the cultivation of ignorance of the spiritual damage wrought by the distortion of reality into merely quantitative bulk. In other words, the self-knowledge implicit in the choice of relentless acquisition as objective necessity must be denied as a choice, otherwise it loses its compulsive force and becomes open to question.

Neither pure introspection (Descartes) nor empirical behaviorism provides a full picture of the nature of man, although they cannot be simply dispensed with either. Here, as always, we must be on guard against the absolutist tendency to elevate the part (either introspection or empiricism) to the level of the whole (human nature). The Aristotelian concept of the intimate relation between the sensuous and knowledge, as aspects of the operation of life, must be adopted in the place of Plato's absolute separation of the physical and the ideal. And, again, our times seem to be dominated by this sort of absolutism in the forms of the religious fundamentalisms, political ideologies and, in our particular case, economic essentialism that all elevate a single aspect of culture over and above the whole of human life. If it is given notice at all, the issue of human self-knowledge is held to be answered and determined by the religious, political or economic form that has been accepted as the self-evident, objective reality.

Without escaping its ties to the physical, the mind or spirit moves quickly from the simple engagement with the environment that characterizes animal life to progressively more purely intellectual stages. Much of our economic and social thought and activity holds people down to the animal level of immediacy, as is implied in fulfillment of the expectation of instant gratification through ever increasing levels of production and consumption. Although it is largely obscured by the claim to timelessness made by our economic theory, this shift in focus and concern from the physical and cosmological to the introspective and anthropological can be traced in the development of religion out of myth and in the general development of philosophical investigation from its earliest Greek origins. This trend finds its highest expressions in the religious command to “know thyself” and in Socrates' question “What is man?”

The Socratic formulation, however, discloses an important distinction between the knowledge of the material world through its objective components and the knowledge of man, which must be sought through a dialogue with him. Philosophy becomes a functional and methodological enterprise, rather than a description of static things, and truth must also change from something like a self-subsisting object into the product of a cooperative effort to answer the question “What is man?” This process and activity of self-examination is the location of the value of human life because is requires those involved to respond to criticism, making them “responsible” and, therefore, moral persons. Our demand for material and sensory saturation, therefore, amounts to an evasion of responsibility. In a way that almost parodies the functional nature of reality, the primacy of the economic mode of culture is sustained as the unquestioned and unquestionable necessity by the cultivation of ignorance of our obligation to critically examine ourselves and acknowledge the consequences of our actions – those consequences are, instead, the will of God, the result of objective political forces or the effects of economic realities. And this rejection of responsibility comes at the worst time, as we find ourselves in a world that is almost entirely subject to human determination.