_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 4, pp. 18 – 24.
Quote from Diderot, p. 18-19
(Google translation):
“We
are touching the moment of a great revolution in the sciences. To the
penchant that spirits seem to me to have in morality, in fine
letters, in the history of nature, and in experimental physics, I
would almost dare to assure that before it is a hundred years old,
three great geometers will not be counted in Europe. This science
will stop at a moment when Bernoulli, Euler, Maupertuis,
and d'Alembert have left it. They will have laid the pillars
of Hercules, and we will not go beyond them.”
Because of some reservations
concerning Enlightenment thought, Diderot asserted that the
opportunities for mathematical innovation had been largely exhausted.
He was, of course, proven wrong by the continued progress of
mathematics and mathematical science throughout the nineteenth
century. However, he did anticipate the decline of the search for a
mathematical anthropology, which was displaced by biological theories
of evolution that promised to unify humanity and nature on a sound
material basis that dispensed with abstract speculation.
Evolutionary theory was indeed successful in integrating humanity
into the general stream of organic life that is guided by chance, but
accounting for humanity's spiritual life with this bio-empirical
methodology reduces culture to a product of nature that is
essentially the same as, albeit more complex than, the spider's web
or the bird's nest. Can this identification of human cultural
work with animal behavior be thought of, in a sense, as an extension
of Luther's identification of contemplation and labor, which merged
economic activity with cultural work and creativity? This
empirical approach certainly generates an impressive inventory of
human faculties and achievements, but no self-evident principle that
integrates these data into a disclosure of a unified human nature
emerges of its own accord. Empiricism and inductive reasoning are
typical of profit-mentality because of their emphasis on the
acquisition of data and the corresponding dismissal of the relevance
or even possibility of an over-arching theoretical formulation that
might both facilitate the identification of pertinent information and
provide the interpretive framework that would give the collected data
meaning (this theoretical guidance and significance must be found in
and based on the assumptions of economic essentialism). Furthermore,
I think that this anti-intellectual empiricism corresponds to the
dismissal of the importance of collective cultural works in, among
other places, Hayek's epistemology (where knowledge is constrained to
that which can be grasped directly while phenomena such as language
are irrelevant or inaccessible and mysterious because they cannot
belong to an individual or limited group of owners). Ideas such as
the “invisible hand”, spontaneous order and an all-embracing,
impersonal market mechanism seem to be more specific but still
quasi-mystical notions that deflect philosophical critique in order
to sustain the empirical rationale of maximizing the accumulation of
data that, ostensibly, will generate its own unifying and
interpretive principle when some “critical mass” of information
is reached. This “preservation of mystery and adventure” (Romney
campaign speech - “...saving the excitement...” of business
competition, etc.) ultimately serves to shield the economic
essentialism that stands in for genuine philosophical scrutiny. The
source of meaning in the symbolic nature of human intellect and
action cannot be acknowledged by the materialism, albeit it a
“functional materialism”, of the economic thought and action that
dominates our culture because that primacy would be undermined if
economics were disclosed as only a part, and not the whole, of
culture. This accumulative methodology operates as an intellectual
and “scientific” counterpart to the other forms of maximization that pervade
our lives. In contradiction of their presumed foundation in pure
fact, these inductive theories are forced by the desire for a
coherent anthropology to assume one of these capacities as the
integrating anthropological principle and defend its precedence over
all other human powers. Again, determination and objectivity
(specifically, here, in the form of a “coherent anthropology”)
cannot be understood as culturally generated from the
empirical/material perspective. Necessity and reality must be
“given” from without, and must be devoid of any distorting
subjective elements (i.e., the semblance of material objectivity
is created in part by the appropriation of the formulaic elimination
of subjectivity by scientific vision). As Cassirer points out,
however, even materialism is a cultural determination; it is
dependent upon a lack of awareness or an ignorance of its symbolic
and cultural nature, as is the case with mythical substantialism. I
contend that economic essentialism and profit-mentality cultivate
this ignorance to sustain their spiritual primacy. The present
crisis in the understanding of human nature results from this
fragmentation which seems absolute and apparently precludes the
development of a concept of the human which can serve as a touchstone
for knowledge. Here we may even see profit-mentality making
virtues out of the consequences of this crisis, as the fragmentation
of knowledge is transformed into "competitive opportunities" and new
“callings”, as every fragment can apparently be made into the
content of a separate discipline by an ambitious and charismatic
intellectual (recall Fukuyama's “Last Man”). All of this is to
say that man is so completely problematic to himself because his
expectation of a material and substantial form of objectivity, by
definition, excludes the functional and symbolic aspects of culture
that constitute the answer to the question “What is man?”.
And, as the personality of the individual theorist becomes decisive
in the context of this philosophical disarray, the conflict between
views and perspectives comes to threaten the human spirit at its
ethical core – man has never been “more problematic to himself
than in our own days.”(Scheler). In other words, we have collected
and assembled an unprecedented amount of data and information
pertaining ourselves, but we have failed to find our humanity in it.
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