_An Essay on
Man_, Cassirer. Bantam Books, NY, January 1970.
Part
II: Man and Culture
Chapter
VI: The Definition of Man in Terms of Human Culture.
pp. 69 – 78.
Plato took a momentous step in
Western thought when he moved beyond Socrates' concentration on the
individual and recognized the necessity of taking the perspective of
corporate and collective human life in order to achieve a
comprehensive philosophical account and understanding of man. While
Plato began with the social form of the state, modern philosophy has
had to acknowledge and incorporate other forms of giving order to
human existence, including language, myth, religion, art, science and
history. Somewhat paradoxically, the empiricist Compte lead the
modern adoption of this perspective with his assertion that man must
be explained by humanity and history rather than through the assembly
of an anthropology out of individual psychological portraits. Later
thinkers, however, rejected the idea that, because the methods of the
mathematical and biological sciences cannot comprehend the specific
nature of the social, society must be understood on its own terms.
Their determination to establish a purely scientific and evolutionary
anthropology led them to eliminate all distinctions between human and
animal existence, including, ultimately, the reduction of human
intelligence to a type of instinct that differs from animal behavior
only in the degree of complexity. The use of the term and concept of
“instinct”, however, frustrated the goal of scientific precision
because its inherent ambiguity generated innumerable and competing
schemes for classifying man's presumed instinctive powers. Thus,
individual reflection, empirical research and historical study failed
to produce a satisfactory definition of man. Cassirer proposes
another approach in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms which, from the
beginning, insists that a philosophical anthropology must provide a
functional definition rather than an account of any substantial
essence or inherent capability, the mere possession of which
designates the human being as such. In other words, man's works and
activity disclose his humanity. Philosophy must explain the
functional differences and connections between the various cultural
forms assumed by this activity, and it must also attempt to uncover
the functional principle they all share. The material accumulated by
the earlier psychological, scientific and historical methods is
invaluable and cannot by dispensed with, but it will not yield a
genuine definition of man until a comprehensive, categorical scheme
is developed to give form and order to such a formidable mass of
data. And although this comprehensive view may seem impossible
because of the tensions and conflicts that arise between cultural
forms, it must be remembered that the unity sought is not an actual
and materially homogenized reality without contradiction but, rather,
a common function that is operative in all of the cultural modes of
creation.
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