_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
2, pp. 6 – 14.
The moral
obligation of self-criticism established by Socrates is extended and
given universal and metaphysical significance by the Stoics including
Marcus Aurelius. The inner harmony achieved and maintained through
Socratic self-examination is regarded as an articulation of the
principle that the order of the universe also “puts into evidence”
(Veblen). This principle locates that which is truly real in the
unchanging and unchangeable inner and outer forms that are disclosed
and apprehended through the human's engagement with indeterminate
life through her power of judgment. She achieves a harmony with and
a moral independence from nature with the exercise of judgment and
reason. But Christianity rejects this self-sufficiency and
independence based on reason, and in this rejection can be seen the
conflict between spiritual powers that characterizes anthropological
philosophy (i.e. revelation vs. reason). Augustine, in particular,
asserts the primacy of her capacity to receive the revealed wisdom of
God over the vain dependence upon inherently faulty human reason.
The medieval concept of man was thoroughly conditioned by the
principle that only the understanding extended by God through grace
can resolve the inconsistencies and limitations of human intellect.
Even into the modern period, there emerges a scientific thinker of
immense stature in the person of Pascal who nevertheless denies
science the spiritual primacy that it is beginning to assume. He
recognizes that the contradictory nature of man cannot be given a
mathematical or logical formulation because these intellectual powers
reject the possibility of contradiction in their most fundamental
assumptions. Thus, Pascal feels compelled to defer to religion as
the only legitimate expression of the contradictions and mysteries
that characterize the human capacity for both sin and salvation and
her relation to God. It seems, however, that the expectation, if
not demand, that the human spirit be free of contradiction is still
very much with us. Indeed, much of our thought seems to be based on
an almost naive form of “scientific” objectivity that is
achieved by eliminating and abstracting out all subjectivity. As
Cassirer points out in a number of places, this minimization of the
subjective is an indispensable condition for the articulation of the
type of objectivity that is characteristic of the “precise”
sciences like physics, but it cannot be applied to the cultural
sciences in the same way or to the same extent. The mere rhetorical
or theoretical denial of human inconsistency does not confer
scientific validity, but tends to dismiss and trivialize moral and
other human considerations as unscientific inconsistencies. And to
the extent that this forced appropriation of the conditions and
methods of physics and chemistry is successful, to the extent that
morality and humanity are excluded and denied their objective value,
our sense of reality is, ironically, undermined as we approach the
dubious ideal of an “impersonal” objectivity. The moral component
of human life, again as Cassirer is stating, is an integral component
of reality, of its stability and objective value, and to attempt to
eliminate it is to cause the ground to move under our feet.
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