Reading from _An Essay on Man_(Cassirer) 006

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

Part I: What is Man?

Chapter III: From Animal Reactions to Human Responses.

pp. 29 – 45.

Setting aside the ambitious, contentious and problematic question of the origin of symbolism, and of the human culture based on it, some headway in the definition of man can be made by distinguishing human symbolic activity from the forms of indirect behavior of animals. Empirical research has demonstrated the ability of animals to respond, especially after a period of training, to tokens as if they were responding to something desirable like food, as if they were employing signs as stand-ins for things that are not immediately present. But this research and the study of animal communication lead, in turn, to the necessity of formulating a definition of speech, through which a distinction between emotional, interjectional utterance and objective, propositional language emerges. There is no evidence that even the most sophisticated animals have ever accomplished the shift from affective utterance to propositional language. Domesticated animals and great apes are ultimately responding to signs and signals that have become more or less physical components of the environmental situations that elicit specific behaviors. However, symbolism is functionally constitutive of “the human world of meaning.” Animals of all sorts are undeniably capable of complex and purposeful adaptations to new circumstances, but their intelligence remains at the purely practical level while human intelligence and imagination developed further into the realm of the symbolic. This transition was dramatically exemplified by the cases of Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman who, as unsighted, deaf and mute children, had been constrained to the level of practicality in which language remained a matter of the direct association of tactile signs with objects of immediate concern. A spiritual revolution occurred for both children in the moment in which they understood the functional significance of the name, i.e. that the act of naming gives form to experience, and they excitedly exercised this newly discovered power by asking the name of everything they encountered. And this universally applicable functionality of the symbol, which clearly can operate on any sensory basis, is the key to understanding human culture itself. As do other forms of symbolism, language has universal applicability, in that “everything has a name”, which is complemented by a high degree of versatility, unlike signs which have a more or less one to one relationship between the individual sign and the single thing it indicates. However, the awareness of this versatility, that the same thought can be expressed with a wide variety of symbols and that the name of a thing can be changed to indicate changed relationships, has been attained only through a long cultural development. Many types of animals as well as human beings are aware of relations in a concrete sense, but only humans have developed the ability to separate and consider the relations themselves apart from direct perceptions, as in, for example, the abstract relationships between geometrical figures and their components. The apparent instances of this abstractive ability in the higher animals always prove to be very rudimentary precisely because they lack the capacity to use symbols. Symbols enable the human being to pull features and elements out of the ceaseless flow of experience in order to concentrate attention upon them and give them stability in consciousness, allowing her to rise above immediate physical and practical concerns and enter the world of cultural objectivity and meaning.
 (Recall the characterization by Groß in _Kultur, Markt und Freiheit_ of our economy as an "attention economy".  Clearly he is referring to the power that those who dominate our attention acquire by leveraging such a fundamental component of culture and the symbolic function.  Also, the combination of sacred and the profane (_The Concept of Work_, Applebaum), the merger of cultural creativity with "biological needs and practical concerns", effected by the absolutism that characterized the thought of the early Protestants (_The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism_, Weber) goes beyond the emergence of the economic as a distinct symbolic form with its own dignity (Arendt).  It attempts to transcend culture and, initially, gain some conscious connection with Divinity, while this "material transcendentalism" has, in our day, taken the form of an ever more intense effort to generate progress that seems to have crossed the line into an attempt to "jump over our own shadow" and escape the symbolic and cultural nature of humanity.)