_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
3, pp. 14 – 18.
After
Pascal's reformulation of the old and persistent conflict between
classical metaphysics and Christian theology, the question of man
starts to be approached from an entirely new direction. The element
of a providential and hierarchical order that is common to the
systems of classical reason and revelation, and which places man at
the center of the universe, is displaced by empirical observation and
logical interpretation. Copernican heliocentrism and other
scientific developments reveal a cosmos that is indifferent to man,
his culture, and his moral concerns, and this indifference is
understood as the starting point of all knowledge, including that
which man has of himself. Here we see the plausibility of
extending scientific vision to the whole of life. If humanity is
understood as just a small and vanishing part of a vast, impersonal
universe, then all genuine knowledge can be expected to reflect this
absence of interest or focus on man. Scientific knowledge begins to
claim a certain objectivity that ”puts man into his place” by
relentlessly minimizing his subjectivity (sounds like early
Protestant asceticism!). The problem arises when this
minimization/elimination (note the correspondence to the idea of
approaching zero in calculus; note also the reformulation of the
meaningful/non-meaning (sacred/profane) distinction implicit in
calculus (the significant quantity of, for example, the volume of a
sphere is approached, but never reached, by minimizing the heights of
the cylinders that can be contained within the sphere (correspondence
of this approach to the volume of a sphere and the approach, by
Puritans, to knowledge and certainty of their future status through
the accumulation of wealth?) and the modern understanding of
humanity's relation to the universe) is understood and applied
absolutely, and “objectivity” and “reality” are considered to
be distorted and contaminated by any hint of subjectivity. With
regard to history in particular, Cassirer will later make the point
that the elimination of the subjective actually eliminates the object
of some forms of knowledge. Thus, the momentous recognition of
humanity's insignificance relative (materially?) to the universe
progressively becomes utilized as the basis for lending the semblance
of scientific objectivity and validity to realms of knowledge that
are actually anthropocentric modes of cultural determination. I
believe this instrumentalization of the modern sense of the cosmos is
especially true of our economics – the impersonal Market, for
example, is an application of this methodological minimization of the
human rather than an empirical description of what actually happens
in commerce. The experience of
this displacement of man from the center of all things was agonizing
even for the most sophisticated thinkers. Man is being being
stripped of the complacency implicit in his tendency to take his
immediate life and experience as the order of the universe. Again,
there is at least some correspondence here to the Protestant denial
of the relief of absolution and the puritanical rejection of repose
in the certainty of one's future state.
The human capacities for judgment and thought are held to be
vanities unless they acknowledge the infinitesimal significance of
their powers. This apparent negation of human reason, like the
criticism of the ancient Skeptics, ultimately becomes a reformulation
of thought and judgment and a reaffirmation of their validity. Bruno
in particular overcomes the complete submersion of humanity within
reality by regarding the infinite character of the universe not as a
limitation and negation of thought (per the classical view of
infinity), but as a measure of the unlimited scope of the human
intellect. This inversion of the negation of reason into
into an affirmation of reason seems to be another point of contact
between the religious developments taking place alongside those in
science in the early modern period. Specifically, Luther was
troubled by the socially articulated distinction between the sacred
and the profane that gave the Church possession of cultural meaning
while consigning those outside of its hierarchy to live basically
empty of meaning. He too seeks to find the positive significance in
the ways of life that had been increasingly denigrated as The Church
became ever more materialistic and corrupt.
Subsequent philosophical and scientific work centered around the
determination and exercise of this newly liberated human intellect,
most significantly in mathematical theory and the concept of the
lawful operation of the cosmos. Spinoza takes the final step in
establishing a rationalistic anthropology that corrects the errors of
mere anthropocentric thought by founding a mathematical system of
ethics, and thereby demonstrating the mathematical unity of humanity
with external reality. Here, again, is the philosophical
anticipation of the scientism that seems to dominate our culture
today. Many people expect the world and their lives to function with
something like mathematical and scientific precision, and this
expectation tends to become a demand that is imposed on the less
powerful. Thus, and contrary to their insistence otherwise, those
who have formulated and continue to maintain orthodox economic theory
rarely live lives that are as thoroughly and rigorously disciplined
by the market as those who live on wages.
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