Essay on man

An Essay on Man, by Ernst Cassirer, presents a philosophy of culture through an examination of the various modes of human knowledge, which for Cassirer, defines culture. Cassirer begins his defense by stating that we are in a “crisis” in our knowledge of ourselves. The question of culture is the question of who we are. For Cassirer this problem requires a structuralist approach as we cannotmerely contemplate the nature of our existence but must contextualize it. The problem, however, is that each individual has their own way of seeing the world as do the various disciplines. Truth is multifaceted and the various modes of human knowledge seem contradictory. Religion yields a different truth than science but so too does the particular science from other sciences, Cassirer claims there islittle unity—human knowledge has become fragmented. Therefore, it is Cassirer’s quest to find the common thread, or as he says, “a clue of Ariadne to lead us out of this labyrinth.”
For Cassirer to solve this problem he must find a common reducible phenomenon that is foundational to all aspects of human knowledge. The primal mechanism of our self-awareness, he proposes, is symbolic thought.Cassirer’s proposition is that symbolic thinking has led to all knowledge, to language, myth, religion, art, and science. Accordingly, man no longer lives “in a merely physical universe,” says Cassirer, “man lives in a symbolic universe.” Therefore, the universe is a condition to man’s experience within it as he can only relate and reason according to his own experience. Cassirer makes a point oftelling us the distinction between a symbol and a mere “sign,” as a sign represents something physical. Cassirer’s symbol is an ideal “form” rather than an indicative or imitative form. Cassirer’s symbolic thinking is a subjective universe, a world shaped by experience rather than a world as it is, apart from man. Accordingly, man seeks to know the universe in order to interpret himself. Here iswhere man becomes reflective and rises above nature, becoming something other than animal, a difference that gravely concerns Cassirer.
The problem of man is in part the difference that sets him apart from the other animals, from the rest of nature. Animals might possess the ability to interpret signs but they fail a truly symbolic thought process. Cassirer offers the concepts of space and time asevolutionary leaps in symbolic thinking. If animals possess a rudimentary capacity for symbolic thought it is man’s conception of space and time that really separates him and makes possible the advanced forms of culture and knowledge. What concerns Cassirer is not actual space and time but conceptualizations of space and time. A point that I disagree with is his insistence that primitive man has aninstinct for space, but is unable to conceptualize it. Cassirer uses ethnographic accounts of contemporary tribes to illustrate his point. The reason I disagree with this particular point is that Alaskan native whalers traditionally carried sticks with them from which they carve the contours of the shoreline, which serves as a rudimentary map. From this point of view, I see the possibility thatprimitive others may possess a different modality rather than lack a symbolic conception of space. This difference, however, does not falsify Cassirer’s theory for an earlier human state of existence. Regardless of origins, symbolic space is a tool for making sense of the environment; it is the premise of geometry, geography, astronomy and the mathematical sciences. Cassirer quotes Kant who saysthat space is our “outer experience” while time is our “inner experience.” Conceptual time gives us memory. As we move into the topic of memory, Cassirer once again becomes concerned with human differences that are apart from the animal world. Cassirer suggests that human memory is more than the recollection of prior stimuli, but a conceptual reconstruction of the past, and again we see the...