Reading from _An Essay on Man_(Cassirer) 008

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

Part I: What is Man?

Chapter V: Facts and Ideals.

pp. 61 – 68.

Through his analysis of human knowledge, Kant demonstrates that the distinction between reality and possibility is a fundamental component of our thought. Unlike animals, which have no conscious access to the possible in their biologically and environmentally determined world, or God, who transcends possibility because every divine thought is also an actuality, human consciousness is characterized by this dual relation because of its reliance upon the symbol, which has an ideal meaning rather than a factual, thing-like existence. The element of the possible in symbolic expression is disclosed by its impairment in cases of mental disorder in which patients can function normally with tasks that are immediately at hand, but struggle or fail at tasks which require abstract considerations involving possibilities. These cognitive pathologies correspond, in a way, to the intellectual hurdles that had to be overcome by thinkers like Galileo, who defied the medieval sense of reality and factuality with his postulation of abstract bodies with perfectly unperturbed motion. Mathematicians, too, have always been confronted with the need to account for types of numbers, such as negative, irrational and imaginary numbers, which seemed impossible or illusory until mathematics was understood to deal with symbolically expressed ideas rather than actual things. Likewise, political and ethical thinkers have refused to confine themselves to forms of government or morality that conform to reality, but, instead, articulate their visions in utopian terms that have the imaginative force to guide society in its development and progress. Rousseau, in particular, explicitly bypassed the factual in the manner of Galileo in order to give expression to a possible social and ethical order. In all of these examples, the symbol exhibits and performs its unique and vital function of facilitating and impelling the movement of culture from how things are to how things might be, to how the world might be a more fit habitation for humanity.