Ernst Cassirer was born in 1874 in Breslav (Poland). Studied in Berlin, Leipzig, Heidelberg. In 1896 he became an assistant to Professor Cohen in Marburg. Later he taught philosophy at Berlin (190&-1919) and Hamburg (1919-1933) universities. After Hitler came to power in Germany, E. Cassirer emigrated to England and received a professorship at Oxford. From 1935 to 1941 he taught philosophy at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden), and then moved to the United States, where he remained until the end of his life, lecturing at Yale and Columbia Universities. E. Cassirer died in 1945 in Princeton (New Jersey).

Of the numerous works of E. Cassirer for researchers of religion, the most interesting are: "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" in 3 vols. (1923-1929), “An Essay on Man. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture (1944).

Being the largest representative of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, E. Cassirer emphasized the importance of the transcendental method for comprehending historical, philosophical and natural science material. Later, the same method was used by him in the analysis of humanitarian knowledge, language, art, politics, history, etc. Thus, E. Cassirer significantly expanded the traditional Kantian problematics (critical analysis of scientific forms of cognition), supplementing it with the philosophy of culture, which included the philosophy of mythology and religion.

Philosophy of Culture by Ernst Cassirer

The name "Philosophy of Culture" should designate a branch or field of philosophy: philosophy applied to the study of a particular fact or set of facts that we describe as culture. This particular area should be indicated on a map of the entire space of which it is a part and described in terms of its relation to adjacent areas of philosophical inquiry, such as ethics or the philosophy of history.

Indeed, culture is one of the themes of Cassirer's philosophy, and forms a whole field of study within the framework of the variety of directions of his thought. But it happens by accident. This statement may seem paradoxical, contradicting the explicit statements of Cassirer himself. Doesn't he clearly distinguish between the philosophy of culture and the philosophy of nature as two separate, albeit related, fields?

However, we insist that considering culture as a separate area or topic of Cassirer's thought is futile and almost certainly leads to the loss of the meaning of his philosophy. Although Cassirer analyzed in detail such forms of culture as language and myth, he almost completely ignored the others; and such selectivity, far from accidental, betrays the main interests in the works of the philosopher. These interests do not lie in the study of culture for its own sake. In thinking about what culture is and trying to describe its nature in terms that are as simple and straightforward as possible, the thought of the researcher may be hooked on some special features and crucial questions. culture like culture anime, seems to indicate careful processing, direction or formation of thought, some kind of education. What is the nature and purpose of this education? Further, culture or civilization differs from primitivism and barbarism, compared to which it claims a richer, more honorable and truly human way of life. What is this superiority and how was it achieved? Why does humanity think that its possession is so unreliable? Can we expect the perfection of culture, as yet unattained, in the near or distant future?

If the reader approaches Cassirer's work with these observations and questions, he will not find the answer. The focus of Cassirer's interests is not in this; the questions that are fundamental for the student are on the periphery of his intellectual universe. We even begin to doubt whether the imaginary questioner correctly understands the meaning of the term "culture" used by Cassirer. Where, then, is the center of gravity in Cassirer's world?

"First philosophy" (πρώτη φιλοσοφία), according to Aristotle, is the science that investigates being as such, or, in more familiar terminology, Reality as such 1 . Cassirer's study, however far removed in some respects from the great trend of philosophia perennis, is still animated by the search for "primary philosophy" as Aristotle understood it. Philosophy of culture for him is first of all philosophy, i.e. exploration of the nature of reality. But this study tends to consider culture as a particularly manifest area of ​​reality. Culture is a privileged document, testifying with incomparable eloquence to the adequacy of the basic concept of "being as such."

Confirmation of the ontological primacy of culture in Cassirer's ideas can be obtained by looking at his literary career. As his philosophy developed, he turned more and more to the problems of culture. This development culminated in the "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" (subsequently summarized in "An Essay on Man"). This great work (magnum opus), a courageously conceived and masterfully executed philosophical interpretation of culture, completed the development of an area that was inaccessible to Cassirer's predecessors, although other members of the Marburg school had previously approached it. It is true that in his enterprise Cassirer was inspired and supported by the prevailing trend of thought. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries German philosophy tried to limit the hegemony of the natural sciences by developing a system of the humanities (Geisteswissenschaft). But if we consider Cassirer's achievements against the background of the joint efforts of those who moved in the same direction, the originality of the solution he proposed becomes even more impressive.

Following Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg school, Cassirer derived his interpretation of reality from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The "Critique" influenced Cassirer's thinking so strongly that it completely determined his interpretation of culture, from its principles to research, as can be seen from the table of contents of the volumes "Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen". The author modestly takes credit only for undertaking the work that Kant considered possible and necessary, but which was not done by the Master for one reason or another. Like Wilhelm Dilthey and Heinrich Rickert, the author claims to complete the Kantian edifice, giving a philosophical justification for the science of nature.

de, which, according to Kant, should accompany the philosophical foundation of the science of culture. Historically, this claim turns out to be futile. The imaginary addition needs a new basic plan and, in fact, a different construction. However, the emphasized commitment to the heritage and spirit of Kant is a striking feature of this new construction.

“One and the same thing is thought and that in which thought exists” 2 . With this saying, Parmenides put an end to naive considerations about the totality of real things and about philosophy as the study of reality that is in the field of view. From it it becomes clear that "existent" is related to "thinkable" not in the same way that a coin is related to a purse, cargo to a ship, or in some other "external" way. These two concepts are connected rather as the relation of "seeing" to "seeing", or "creation" to "created". Despite their differences, they form an inseparable unity.

Kant found a new formula for the views of the Eleatics. In our search for knowledge, we collect ideas: knowledge, the result of this process, is a synthesis. But can we, by combining ideas into a composite whole, expect to discover something that, by definition, lies outside the sphere of mental operations, i.e. reality? We can, Kant replies, provided that the principles guiding our synthesis are identical to the principles that determine the structure of reality. Let us call the totality of knowledge based on sensory perception "experience"; instead of principles, we will say “conditions of possibility”; statements relating to these fundamental conditions, we will call "judgments a priori". After these terminological changes, Kant's "highest principle of all synthetic judgments" will look like this: "We assert that the conditions for the possibility of experience in general are similar to the conditions for the possibility of objects of experience, and therefore they have an objective validity in a synthetic judgment. a priori"*.

Cassirer puts the question in terms of Parmenides and then, as an answer, confirms Kant's solution.

“The first goal of the starting point of speculative reflection is indicated by the concept of Being. The moment when this concept formulates itself and consciousness reminds of the unity of Being, dominating the complexity and diversity of the existing, a specifically philosophical method of considering the world arises” 4 .

With this ontological conception of philosophy in mind, Cassirer expresses Parmenides' definition in terms of Kant's "transcendental" logic: "A concept refers to an object because and insofar as it [the concept] is a necessary and indispensable prerequisite for objectification: because it is a function for which only there can be objects, i.e. permanent basic units in the flow of experience” 5 . In simpler and shorter terms: "A logical concept is a necessary and sufficient condition for knowing the nature of things" 6 .

"Being," according to this transcendental logic, means "to be defined," and thinking is the process of definition. So

Thus, there is no essence outside the sphere of thought, and there is no metaphysics as supposed knowledge about essences. In transcendental idealism there is no place for the transcendent, i. supersensible reality; he rejects Natural Theology and similar flights of speculative contemplation. Together with metaphysics, the “reflection theory” (Abbildtheorie) is also rejected. This theory naively interprets the ideas "inside the mind" as copies of "things outside of it", thus dividing the indivisible, then picking up the pieces again, using dubious analogies 7 .

In considering this "critical" or "transcendental" logic, it must be remembered that "naive", that is, pre-Kantian, metaphysics was not so naive as to agree with the non-philosophical concept of knowledge as a passive image reflecting a given reality. Naivety, of course, is immortal. But it began to die out in philosophy since Parmenides put forward his monumental definition; and traditional metaphysics, created by Plato and Aristotle, did not fully take into account the teachings of "Father Parmenides". Be that as it may, this stubborn upholding of the truth, which seems absurd, expressed in words firm and fancifully ornate, like an archaic statue, was differentiated by followers, which made it flexible and alive. The main goal of this differentiation was to find a place for the finite knowing person as an integral part of reality - a part that was rejected by the arrogant eleat by way of compromise in the second, pragmatic part of his poem.

In Aristotle, the identity of "thinking" and "being" is preserved at the top of the pyramid of reality. The motionless mover, the form liberated from matter, the action free from potentiality, is described as "νόηις νοήσεως", thinking turning to itself, reality as a self-cognizing mind; the object exists by thinking about itself. But in the sublunar world inhabited by man, this original unity is divided into two. The knowing person encounters knowable things—things that exist, whether or not he is aware of their existence. However, that they "become known" is by no means accidental to their existence, in the same sense that "portraiting" is not accidental to man. First, the kind of existence that a thing possesses includes a degree of knowability, which depends on the proportion of form in its structure. Thus a star is more cognizable than a lump of clay, a soul is more cognizable than a body. For knowledge separates the form of a thing from its matter: the knowing mind is the center of forms. Secondly, the identity that becomes complete at the top, in the form of forms, is also present in the human act of knowing, only in a limited form. “In the case when objects do not contain matter, the thinking and the thinkable are identical (το αυτό εστί το νοούν και το νοούμενον)” 8 . The wording itself is reminiscent of Parmenides.

A person can rise to the comprehension of forms not contaminated by matter. But he is surrounded by the complex reality of

we, connected with matter. Therefore, the process of cognition in the human mind, according to Aristotle, is an interaction and cooperation between activity and passivity. This duality corresponds to the duality of the human condition. Man, being limited, is one thing among many things in the world that are affected and reacted. At the same time, man, thanks to reason, is in a certain sense the totality of all things.

Turning now to Kant, the source of Cassirer's epistemology, we find that the interplay of activity and passivity has been superseded by a new emphasis on the constructive activity of the mind. Eleatic identity is being revived in the spirit of a modern, post-Cartesian subject. However, the framework of this idealistic motive, which reverses the natural order by adapting objects to concepts 9 , is strictly limited to the world of sense: the world of phenomena interpreted by "experience"; and this phenomenal world does not coincide with reality. "Criticism" teaches that "the object must be understood in a double sense, namely as a phenomenon and as a thing in itself" 10 . Outside the phenomenon, all the essential features of the metaphysical picture of the world, although inaccessible to speculative knowledge, are preserved for enlightened faith. This preservation, far from mere compromise, arises from the ethos of Kant's design. By abolishing the principle of happiness and displacing contemplation from its sovereign place, Kant wrests man from his refuge in nature, while at the same time hindering his imaginary ascent to God. But at the same time, he believes that he takes away only what a person has never rightfully owned.

Indeed, Kant liberates a person from illusions and clears his mind from speculative vanity. Nevertheless, by belittling him in this way, he does not leave a person in hopeless metaphysical homelessness. Instead, he returns the property to the settler of the unearthly world, God and knowable freedom and bliss - not the cognitive ability of man, but his "practical faith". A man in a sober state of mind, putting aside intellectual pride, must reverently submit to the law that will determine his place in the order of things and of which the voice of duty in his own mind is an unequivocal confirmation. In addition, the interaction of spontaneity and passivity in the process of cognition is preserved. Again, the theory of knowledge is reinforced by the idea of ​​human limitations. It is assumed that the very refusal by which we reject metaphysical perception will establish the correct relationship between ourselves and the objects of the metaphysical world. Having applied force, we come to the concept of the unknowable intelligibilia (νούμενα) - the unknowable, it must be added, for us, for man.

Following the general line of neo-Kantian thought, Cassirer accepts Kant's "highest principle of all synthetic judgments" - the identification of "conditions for the possibility of experience" with "conditions for the possibility of objects of experience." At the same time, again obeying the Marburgian model, he goes further than Kant. Kant's "objects of experience" are not objects as

such, but "phenomena", visible above the "thing in itself". Therefore, the Kantian identification is limited. The neo-Kantian, rejecting the "thing in itself", makes this identification universal. It deprives the object of all its substantiality. For him, the object is the result or "function" of the logical process of objectification, and the residue that resists this "functionalization" becomes a task - an infinitely distant goal for further acts of logical determination. Kant's transcendental logic is used to outgrow the limited area given to it by its creator.

If God held the truth in one hand and the ways of searching for it in the other, offering us a choice, we would have to, Lessing argued, ask the Almighty to keep the truth for ourselves, and we leave the search for it. Hermann Cohen objects to this. What the truth means for God does not concern us, but what concerns us, gifts in two hands are in fact one gift: truth is its search 11 . In the same vein, Cassirer quotes Faust's translation of the first words of the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the work" 12 . Logos is creation, the positing of reality. All this goes further than Kant in the sense that the transcendental synthesis is seen as constituting not only "objects of experience" but also objects as such.

Along with this radicalization of Kant's thesis of transcendental logic, Cassirer returns to the period before Kant - not to pre-Kantian metaphysics, but to pre-metaphysical, i.e., pre-Platonic ontology: to Parmenides. For the motionless, complete Eleatic Being, a modern dynamic satellite was found. This, of course, does not coincide with the recognized aspiration of the neo-Kantian thinker, who by definition is devoid of a tendency to archaism. But, limited by his logic of transcendental identification, he comes to accept an archaically simplified concept of Being. It so happened that this simplification was supported by the scientific ideal prevailing in industrial civilization. The organized cooperation of large groups, made efficient by the division of labor into multiple functions—the main achievement of modern industry—was inapplicable to the complex integrity of metaphysics. Her "tremendous helplessness" (G.K. Chesterton) was not up to modern standards. On the other hand, the neo-Kantian idea of ​​cognition as an endless process of determination, understood as the total cooperation of individuals and groups, seemed more in line with the spirit of the times.

Be that as it may, while recognizing that this interpretation of pre-Socratic features, so strikingly typical of various currents of modern philosophy, is far from exhaustive, the logic of the Neo-Kantian return to Parmenidean simplicity is both clear and convincing. As the transcendental synthesis, the act of objectivation, achieves an unlimited scope, receptivity (or passivity) in the knower is reduced to nothing. Together with his receptivity, the knower as a finite subject also loses

out of view; and the anthropological support for the theory of knowledge, reinterpreted but retained by Kant, disappears. The “bifurcation” of ontological identity, which, according to Plato and Aristotle, showed a person as being in the “world” and the world as existing for a person, is smoothed out. We move in a self-sufficient sphere of thought containing objects, and this sphere leaves as little space for the man of knowledge as does the Elean sphere of Being. The cognizer looks at this sphere as if "from the outside". He never, under any circumstances, finds himself in it.

We ask Parmenides about man and about the facts that obsessively arise in his life: the choice between good and evil, the cycle of life and death, and the change of seasons. In response, he gets rid of us with information about the "opinions of mortals" and about the names that they decided to give things 13 . We ask the Neo-Kantian about man, and he refers us to empirical psychology and empirical anthropology. But this, of course, is not a complete answer to our question. Man is portrayed in his philosophy as a subject related to objects. The subject-object relationship is all-pervading, omnipresent. However, Cassirer argues that there is no clear line dividing the two related spheres. When meaning is realized, it carries with it both subject and object as polar "moments" involved in its structure; in other words, it is the result of the interaction between the two poles. "To be", from this point of view, means "to be a synthesis" of subject and object, or ego and world. But according to this definition, the world, as well as the Ego, are deprived of the status of "being" and "reality".

Using a simile so important to Plato, we can liken synthesis to tissue. Let us imagine a student of weaving, carefully observing the expanding pattern of longitudinal and transverse threads, but completely ignorant of the loom, shuttle and raw materials. He is quite ready to closely follow the progress of the work, but is not able to see the tools and thread that do this work. The perplexed student will try to fill in the gap in his ideas by imagining hypothetical factors that would explain the mysterious growth of the finished tissue. Being inventive, he could succeed in inventing contraptions invisible to him. But, instead of leaving him to his own devices, we will increase his confusion by adding a mental disorder to the visual defect. Thus we will deprive him of the ability to think or imagine anything except in terms of the structure of the fabric, and accordingly endow him with a purely "textile" language.

The student with a double defect in our parable is a person who is trying to explore the "subject" and "reality" in the spirit of the neo-Kantian approach. These two polar concepts play a decisive role for him: they designate the end points of the axis on which his interpretation rotates. At the same time, he finds that he is denied the right to include them in the scope of his analysis. By definition, one of the two poles - the pole of the object - directing the advance

cognitive synthesis does not go beyond the horizon of the cognizer. At the same time, the Ego, manifested by its activity, always remains behind him. The “fleeting nature” of both the “ego” and the “world,” as it appears in neo-Kantian epistemology, in the full sense of the word, points to the situation of the knower as opposed to potential objects of knowledge. But the question is whether the analysis of the cognitive relation "subject-object" can provide the basis for the construction of a philosophical doctrine. In other words, is the situation in which the world exists for the human observer (whereas the human participation in the world as operating force lost sight of) as prototypical for the interpretation of reality as neo-Kantianism claims? After all, an understanding of culture can only be achieved on the basis of an adequate concept of human participation in the world. Therefore, the attempt to develop the transcendental logic of neo-Kantianism into a philosophy of culture is a completely hopeless enterprise. Nature without man is imaginable, although it may seem fragmentary. But culture, of course, is an object created by man. Although it serves as the subject of his research, it primarily exists thanks to man and in man.

Finding strength in weakness is a sign of a creative mind. In the hands of Kassirer, transcendental logic becomes an effective tool for solving the problems of the human world. Within its limited limits, this precise instrument reaps fruits that an instrument adapted to a deeper or broader analysis would likely leave unattended.

The analysis of the transcendental synthesis can move in one of two directions, depending on which interest prevails. Interest can be directed either to the discovery of "foundations", i.e., the basic positing acts that provide the basis for subsequent syntheses and endow the whole process with the status of an independent "science" (επιστήμη); or may focus on resulting structures. It was Hermann Cohen, the founder of the Marburg school, who took the "risk path" to the discovery of the origins. In his Logic we see how he tries with all his might to wrest Being as "something" from the original "nothing" - "logogony", which drives the thinking mind through the narrow passage of "extreme confusion" to gradual self-determination 14 . With Cassirer, the nature and direction of the transcendental enterprise has changed. Gone was the heroic fervor with which the globus intellectimlis was set in motion by the "lever of the first cause"; the provincialism of the founder, which in a strange way hindered his vision, also disappeared. Instead, we see an analyst who, with open intentions and heightened sensitivity, is investigating those structural features that cognitive synthesis reveals in its various forms, abundantly presented in numerous directions. modern science. This new trend, close in spirit to Husserl's phenomenology, brought its first fruits in the field of logic of the natural sciences. But gradually

but it gave rise to a broadening of the perspective which made possible the philosophy of culture.

Once we have accepted the basic principle of "critical philosophy" - the primacy of the creative mind over the given reality, "function" over "object", we do not need, as Cassirer argues, to limit ourselves to considering the cognitive function and its objective correlate, the thing as knowable. There are other types of meaningful structures through which the mind manifests its creativity, different from knowledge, but no less important to the whole. Each forms its own area of ​​meaning, each is ordered and expressed according to its own laws, its own "style". Mythological thought, language, art - these are the main examples of autonomous "structures of meaning" that Cassirer has in mind. It is only by including these non-cognitive structures in its field of vision that transcendental idealism achieves recognition. Thus, the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture. It tries to understand and show how the entire content of culture, to the extent that it is not just a specific content, but is based on the universal principle of form, presupposes a creative act of the spirit.

The defeat of the naive-realistic vision of the world is incomplete as long as idealistic analysis is limited to knowledge. Recognizing that certain structural features object of knowledge derive from the formative activity of the mind, the realist may still insist that there must be an independent "something", a given, existing outside the subject-object relation. His point of view, Cassirer argues, becomes untenable as soon as we replace the world with "culture". Faced with many forms of culture, he must see that the desire to hold on to the idea of ​​an independent non-mental substratum, a "thing in itself", will no longer be of any use to him. Here, finally, the attitudes of the mind indisputably manifest themselves in their activity. There is distinctness, structure, clear meaning, but no shadow of supra-mental givenness. Representing these structures and meaningful contexts is tantamount to distinguishing between many major "directions" or "trends" of the mind, each of which is expressed by an object or set of objects. And these objects are simply products, fully shaped by the creative "direction" from which they emerge. "Being" is swallowed up by "doing". The work of art exists. But the existence we attribute to it is derivative. It actually contains only that to which it refers and the product of which it is - artistic imagination. The world of aesthetic objects is only a continuous and ordered manifestation of one of the cosmogonic strivings of the mind. The same is true of the world of mythological thought and language.

In his modern development physics has lost the concept of material reality. Models explaining subatomic

structures can no longer be regarded as sufficiently reliable reflections of the nature of the microworld. Their value must be defined in terms of their usefulness in predicting the possibility of future events. These new physical concepts, instead of "representing" facts, allow the physicist to navigate his relationship with nature, creating what Heinrich Hertz called "symbols". This term, which seemed to signal the collapse of naive realism in physics, was picked up by Cassirer and endowed with new and wide possibilities. The structures he intended to analyze in his philosophy of culture he decided to call "symbolic forms".

This name seems appropriate. In ancient Greece, the old bonds of friendship and hospitality were recognized and restored if the two fragments of the ring, signs of recognition, exactly matched. Such a ring, or any object that fulfills its role, was called a symbol. A symbol in the original sense of the Greek word is a sign. Cultural forms also signify something. They express meaning. In a symbol, the so-called sign is clearly distinct from what it stands for. The sign is two physical objects joined together, the signified is two minds joined together. In Cassirer's "symbolic form" this distinction is also maintained. There is a comprehensible or imaginary form: a sequence of articulate sounds, an arrangement of lines and colors, a "picture of the world"; these tangible forms are meant to point to something intangible. They are the essence of the utterance. Each of the various "form areas" embodies inner world. Each has its own language.

At this moment, the metaphor of the symbol collapses and, at the same time, acquires a new meaning. The ring is one thing, the union of two ancient families or clans is another, and it is not difficult for us not only to distinguish, but also to separate these two types of reality. Both can exist independently of each other. This separability is absent in Cassirer's "symbolic forms". Although the sign and the meaning are different, they belong together inextricably. They are as applicable to each other as the broken halves of a ring. In the same way they form an inseparable whole. This proximity of the relationship between "form" and "meaning" distinguishes the true symbolic form from conventional semantic systems, such as Morse code or signs used in symbolic logic, which are means of conveying ready-made meaning, which can at any time be superseded by alternative, more convenient means. Not so with "symbolic form". It is irreplaceable, inseparable and cannot be arbitrarily constructed. It is not contained in the form, but is contained as a form; a means endowed and animated with a meaning, a meaning that expresses itself in form.

The mind weaves a dress without seams. A linguistic expression can be translated from one language to another, although even then the translation will never be a complete equivalent of the original. But the content expressed

what is worn in one type of symbolic form, for example, in language, cannot be torn off from its “natural” manifestation and sewn onto another symbolic garment. The meaning of languages ​​is inexpressible in painting, and the meaning of music is inexpressible in terms of mythological thinking. Every realm of symbolic form, be it language, art, or mythological representation of the world, must be taken in its own terms and deciphered according to the creative direction or tendency that determines the structure of that particular realm. To expose this unique structure, neither adding nor missing, but exactly following in the footsteps of mens creatrix (creative thought) - that is the task of the transcendental analysis of language, mythology, art. Philosophy appears as the universal translator of the many "languages" through which the mind expresses its inner richness. It operates, in Cassiere's own terms, as the "consciousness of culture" 16 .

Transcendental analysis, as applied by Cassirer, is well suited to this task. He works with a dynamic and highly flexible notion of "form" that applies equally to all areas of symbolic expression. Kant in "transcendental logic" considers the act of cognition as a synthesis of the diversity of sensory data. This idea of ​​a synoptic construction, purged of the realist element that has grown into it from the Kantian notion of "givenness," turns out to be an excellent vehicle for an interpretation that should go far ahead of epistemology in the entire field of cultural achievement. Myths and language, religious symbols and works of art, all together and individually show the superiority of one point of view, particular in each separate area, but similar in mode of operation to the others, and this point of view unites and organizes an infinite variety into an ordered Kingdom of Forms. To understand a cultural phenomenon, be it a religious belief, an artistic motif, or a linguistic expression, means to define it in the sphere of symbolic expression to which it belongs and from which it derives its meaning. In other words, the principle of synthesis is that the phenomenon in the analysis should be presented from the angle of view corresponding to it.

Where do material elements come from, united by transcendental synthesis in several areas of their action? “Nowhere” seems to be the correct answer. These material elements, although they provide a certain content, do not exist outside or before the limits of the forms in which they take shelter. They owe their specificity and, in fact, their existence to their relation to the universal form; This statement is also true in reverse. Form and matter, according to this point of view, are strictly correlated, synthesis is both diversification and unification. Here we see how Cassirer follows the path in which Fichte, Schelling and Hegel moved away from Kant: away from the “thing in itself”, according to

21 Law. 3555 625

in relation to which the subject had to be the sufferer or perceiver rather than the directly active partner.

Apparently, the logic that requires the dialectical interdependence of "single" and "multiple" in Cassirer and his predecessors tends to radical idealism. But Cassirer's decisive departure from Kant's residual realism saves the idealist from a contradiction, only to drag him into another, no less serious difficulty. If the concrete content does not arise from a material given outside the mind, then it must be generated by the mind. How, then, is this “inframental” bifurcation to be explained? How can one explain the concentration of analysis on "form" if "form" and "matter" are of the same origin and, consequently, of the same ontological status? Cassirer uses language throughout, which assumes an understanding of the mind in terms of common sense as exercising in the world of "given" objects. This point of view follows from such descriptive expressions as the expression of meaning, unification, synoptic organization, etc. But the inexorable dialectic of transcendental idealism refutes these and similar terms and reduces them to the level of metaphors. No language is capable of expressing directly what the idealist seeks to think.

Language difficulty indicates a deep-seated difficulty. We are brought face to face with an ancient cosmogonic riddle. The original One seems to need opposition in order to awaken it to action. Requires a metaphysical antagonist

Der reizt und wirkt und muss als Teufel schaffen* 1 .

In Cassirer's philosophy, cultural productivity is parthenogenesis, the birth of a spirit that lives alone. Substance, he insists, must be transformed into function, "being" into "doing." But function is distinguishable only against the background of substance, just as doing requires something in relation to which doing is done. The attempt to translate everything into doing destroys doing. This is exactly what happens in Cassirer's philosophy of culture. Total dynamism is proclaimed, the boundless freedom of the creative mind, but the result obtained is a meaning frozen in strictly static structures, like the Genesis of Parmenides, "immovable, fettered by powerful chains without beginning and without end" 18 .

Parmenides tried very hard to ward off the encroachments of non-being, about which, he stubbornly insisted, no assertion could be made except that "it is not." Melissus and Zeno, armed with the double-edged sword of the Parmenidean dialectic, continued their hopeless struggle until in Gorgias, the prodigal son of the Eleatic house, non-existence won. The moral of this story was revealed by Plato. Justifying himself before Parmenides, he took possession of the

* “As a demon teasing him, let him excite him to the point” (German).

his thesis and recognized a certain mode of existence of non-being - the existence of "images" (eidola) 19 . Thus, he limited the scope of Parmenides' "ontological identity" (knowledge and being) and made possible the philosophy of a finite world and a finite knower. Similarly, the atomists used emptiness (the successor to Parmenides' non-being) as an auxiliary cosmogonic principle. In our time, when metaphysics is collapsing from decay, neo-Kantianism has returned to the Eleatic identification, and again, on the periphery of the restored sphere of Being, the teasing presence of the unsuccessfully expelled non-being makes itself felt. His name, according to Kassirer, is "the stream of experience" from which symbolic forms are said to crystallize. The Matrix of Being, being itself non-being, no matter how necessary it may seem, turns out to be hopelessly alien in the transcendental scheme. It is supposed to be objectivizable. But it is not objectified. Therefore, it doesn't exist.

As the "stream of experience" emerges as a passive substratum that has yet to be objectified, a barely discernible active partner emerges at the other pole of the transcendental axis: that which objectifies but has not yet passed into objectivity. And again, in accordance with the strict laws of transcendental logic, this calm, so to speak, “fluid” creativity is kept for a long time in the outer boundaries of the world of philosophical discourse. To be on a par with transcendentally acceptable concepts, it lacks the stamp of objectivity that can only come from synthesis. This still vaguely conceived creativity is more reminiscent of the Christian God than the Platonic demiurge, who, with the Eternal Pattern before him, inclines the "erring cause" to obedience to his formative will. According to the "critical" point of view, there is no material that can be formed. Creation is creation out of nothing creation ex nihilo. But, of course, the creative mind, revealing itself in symbolic forms, left the celestial spheres to take its place in the human realm. It is now alternately called "life" - a name denoting its present habitat, and "spirit", in memory of its high origin. Life or spirit in Cassirer's philosophy is close to the world spirit Hegel. But while the latter itself manifests itself in history, revealing the rhythm of its movements for our observation, Cassirer's "life" is known only through its results. At the same time, the element of transcendence retained by Hegel is rejected. Cassirer's philosophy is purely "immanentist". Its principle of creativity is understood in the spirit of the era, the blind faith of which was classically reflected in the "worship of humanity" of Auguste Comte.

Let us recall the textile apprentice whom we have likened to a follower of "critical" or "transcendental" idealism. This student, as we agreed, should not see either his tools or raw material. He can only see the fabric itself. Loom and shuttle, in our comparison,

correspond to "life" (or "spirit"), the thread as raw material - to the "stream of experience". We cannot save our student from worrying about these factors that are invisible to him. In the same way, the ideas of "creative life" and "stream of experience" occupy the attention of the critical analyst. But additional condition which we have agreed upon, as we now see, cannot be observed. We tried to bewitch the victim of our experiment in such a way as to make him think of everything (including tools and material) in terms of the finished fabric. It turns out that this is more than human flesh and blood can bear. Speaking non-metaphorically: metaphysics cannot be renounced by a vow of abstinence. Throw it away with a pitchfork of criticism: it will return anyway (tarnen usque recurret). Certain metaphysical beliefs also underlie Cassirer's philosophy of culture. His very determination to abstain from metaphysics is dictated by his immanentist metaphysics, a self-negating metaphysics doomed to painful atrophy.

The common denominator of the various symbolic forms is that they are in the nature of objectification principles and are unknowable variants of Kant's "synthesis of transcendental self-consciousness". But this is not the only connection between them, they have a kind of family resemblance to each other, although they form different “languages”: analogies in their “syntax” and the same topics are noticeable. This analogous structure of the various "spheres" is reflected in the same order of their analysis in the three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. The analysis of language (Volume 1), the analysis of myth (Volume 2), and the analysis of the process of cognition (Volume 3) begin with a consideration of time and space. This, of course, is done in accordance with the pattern set by Kant's "transcendental aesthetics", the opening part of the Critique of Pure Reason. But Cassirer adds a discussion of the notion of number that has no counterpart in the Critique.

For Kant, self-consciousness and time are closely related to each other. Time is "a form of inner feeling." Thus, while allowing the study of the ego to follow its "transcendental aesthetics" relentlessly, Cassirer remains guided, though not by the spirit, but by the table of contents of Kant's work. The last part in all three volumes roughly corresponds to the "transcendental logic" of the Master, insofar as it rises above the outlines of the sensible world to more abstract relations.

The significance of these analogies is obvious. Language, myth, knowledge are various means, they all reflect the light emitted by the same luminary, or, using a more "transcendental" speech pattern, they are different idioms expressing the same content. This all-encompassing content has a triple structure: the sensory world, the Ego, and the Ego orienting itself in the world. The world, a temporal sequence of events located in space and showing an amazing variety of properties - this world is reflected in linguistic signs, comprehended by mythological consciousness, in-

interpreted by religion and art, known by science. In its transition from one medium to another, it is comparable and at the same time incomparable to the melody played on different instruments. And what is true of the first member of the triad, the sensible world, is similarly true of the ego and the relationship between the individual and the world.

For example, space as a property of earthly existence can be found in both mythological and scientific interpretations of reality. There are no two different spaces: mythological and scientific. No matter how one understands space, it has certain stable properties: it has dimensions and is the location of things: "here", "there", inside one thing, at a distance from another thing, etc. From a different point of view, however, there are really different spaces or different types of spaces. In the mythological worldview, no clear distinction is made between a place and the thing that fills the place. "Here" and "there" are understood as properties of objects. Things have their "natural" place and moving can destroy them. Similarly, directions in space coincide with the properties of reality: north is air, as well as war and hunting; the south is fire, as well as medicine and agriculture, and so on. The nature of this "mythological" space is not much different from the space as we understand it in everyday life. But only remotely it resembles a strictly homogeneous space of Euclidean geometry - "places of places", completely cut off from localized objects. Time, number, attitude, ego - they all show the same flexibility. While retaining their nature, they nevertheless undergo changes according to the range of meanings in which they appear. They are "multilingual" in the sense that they express themselves in different "languages" such as religion, art, or science.

The tripartite pattern, repeated in each of the symbolic forms, reflects a more basic triad. "Triptych": the world-ego-categorial relations forms in the sphere of educated structures a copy of the triune forming structure - the "highest" in the sphere of transcendental principles. "World" corresponds to the "stream of experience", "ego" to "life", and the categorical relations that ride this dichotomy to "transcendental synthesis". The former relate to the latter as non-linguistic conditions that allow the language (voice, transmitted message) to have a universal grammar.

A "universal grammar", showing the uniformity of all types of symbolic expressions, generates many "languages" through the principles of specification, and the specific structure is combined in each separate area with an all-pervading structure into a complex pattern. Thus, one particular difference (differentia specified) transforms "universal grammar" into what is literally called language, another specifying principle forms a type of expression called "religion", a third forms art, and so on. The principles of specification are not achieved by deduction. Cassirer

even refrains from presenting them in an abstract form (in abstracto). The cultural analyst, he argues, should not compete with natural science in attempting to formulate universal laws that govern causally related events. Instead, he should try to "make visible" "the totality of forms" held together by the unity of "style". The concepts by which style is comprehended do not "define" - they "characterize". In terms of Cassirer's own methodology, the "structural analysis" that he brings to culture is in the middle between natural science, which aims to discover universal laws, and historiography, which emphasizes the individuality of facts 20 . With this logical topology, Cassirer contributes to the protracted and noisy book battle that Wilhelm Windelband started in 1894 with a timely and apt platitude by pointing out the difference between the generalization of knowledge (Erklaren) and individualization of knowledge (Verstehen). His reward in this battle was the philosophical foundation of the humanities. (Geisteswissenschaft).

To demonstrate the unity of style, characterizing one type of expression as myth, another as art, a third as religion, and so on, the conceptual means traditionally used by neo-Kantian thinkers were unsuitable. Neither the pompous construction of Hermann Cohen nor the careful discrimination of Heinrich Rickert would have helped Cassirer quickly solve the problem. For a long time Windelband's terms "idiographic" and "nomothetic" were discussed by disputing methodologists. Due to his belonging to the Marburg school, Cassirer was perceived as a person prone to the broadest generalizations, but he also possessed that subtle art of individual search, which was manifested in his intellectual antipodes: in the historical school and Wilhelm Dilthey. With Cassirer, neo-Kantianism, originally endowed with rigidly constructive methods, became sensitive to the subtlest nuances of style and structure, a type of construction that reveals its secrets to the physiognomist-observer rather than to the classifier of logic. In Cassirer's work, transcendental construction and empirical interpretation came to a fruitful mutual understanding.

Mythological thinking is dominated by what Cassirer describes as "the fusion of related concepts" 21 . A wound received in battle is perceived not just as a result of the actions of the enemy: in a sense, this is the enemy, the presence of the destructive power of which is in the affected body of a person. In the same way, the parts are not only seen as constituting a whole, but each part represents the whole, and to some extent is the whole. Man's footprints, or his nails, are in some way the man himself; they are the bearers of the "real power" concentrated in the personality. The unification of related, but different elements passes through all levels of the mythological picture of the world. Together with other features, it forms a "private difference" that defines a myth as a myth and opposes it to others.

different types of symbolic expression, such as religion and art. However, Cassirer does not derive the nature of myth from "complicity" or "fusion" as a principle, but operates in a way that might be called "constructive empiricism". He first examines his collection of data, a staggeringly bountiful harvest garnered by careful study of the anthropological literature, and then dwells on some salient features essential to the structure of the field under study. These features he explores in every nuance, until he finally manages to develop an extraordinary clarity of a consistent and balanced "set of forms."

Naturally, this structural interpretation, with its scrupulous attention to facts, is ultimately determined by the principles of transcendental philosophy. But to a large extent this philosophical orientation, far from imposing ready-made concepts on intractable material, acts as a critical catalyst. We tend to translate our experience into a set of stereotypical forms that are most convenient for us because of their usefulness in practical life. In doing so, we simply overlook the unique nature of these experiences. Against this "pragmatic delusion" the analysis of symbolic forms provides an effective antidote.

In ancient Greece, language, as a system of phonetic signs, was the subject of a famous controversy. Those who regarded these signs as existing "by nature" (φύσει) were in discussion with those who considered them to be by design (νόμω). And so far, as the emergence of semantics shows, the ancient "conventionalism" has not yet died out. This is the touchstone for the Cassirer arbitrage method. The study of linguistic forms, carried out under the authority of transcendental philosophy, presents language as a unique type of expression. This "symbolic form" of language as language is not adequately described either by linguistic naturalism, with its emphasis on onomatopoeic connections between sign and signified objects, or by conventionalism, which insists on the arbitrary character of signs. Another example is the dispute between the theory of imitation and the theory of expression in aesthetics. Here again unique creative aspiration, embodied in works of art, is unfairly likened to the type of objective existence that we are most familiar with in everyday life. Once again, the analyst of symbolic forms, with his attention to the particular difference of aesthetic form as aesthetics, can judge the disputants, rejecting their false differences.

Up to this point, symbolic forms have been interpreted by us as independent areas that have a similar structure, but in other respects are closed, not interconnected. Nevertheless, in addition to their generic properties as forms, there are certain specific connections and relationships between them. As we now focus our attention on the relationships of one form to another, we come to another factor that has been ignored so far. The symbolic structures seemed to be characterized by an Eleatic inconsistency.

visibility. However, studying the relationship between them, we notice a glimpse of their dynamism.

Some of the symbolic forms, as Cassirer distinguishes them, can - and others cannot - coexist in the same mind or in the same cultural milieu. Language, for example, coexists with religion peacefully and in fruitful cooperation, while scientific knowledge is intolerant of myth. This observation provides a clue to the configuration and relationships of Forms.

It is significant that the philosophy of symbolic forms begins with language. As a result, language occupies a unique place in the scheme of cultural structures. It is the only form that connects with all other forms. Whether the person is a savage with a mind clouded by sorcery, superstition, or a representative homo sapiens, consumer and creator of books on philosophy, as a human being, he, according to Aristotle's definition, is "an animal endowed with the gift of speech" 22 .

Cassirer distinguishes three linguistic phases, characterized by the predominance of imitative, analogous and symbolic expression. At the stage of imitative expression, the word is an imitative gesture close to what it stands for. The primitive Ewe language, for example, has no less than thirty-three "phonetic images" for different ways of "walking", and we can believe that against the background of the imitative power and resurrecting liveliness of each of them, even such colorful English verbs such as "to walk staggering" (stagger), "to walk important" (strut), "to walk awkwardly" (lumber), and the like, seem to be overwhelmed by the lethargy of thought. AT modern languages this primitive type of expression is preserved in those fossils of language which we call onomatopoeic 23 . A similar stage is reached when the organization of the phonetic signs corresponds to the organization of the events denoted. The similarity between an event and a phonetic signal is here replaced by an analogy between the order of things and the order of sounds. Thus, a difference in voice pitch can be used to signal a difference in distance, and doubling (as in do, dedi) serves to indicate the past tense. Finally, with the achievement of the symbolic stage, the heterogeneity of sign and fact is understood and fully exploited. The phonetic symbol must "mean" (bedeuten), not just "denoting" (bezeichnen), and the mind now moves with maximum freedom in a fully controlled environment of linguistic expression.

Gradual development, as it turns out, occurs towards greater "spiritualization" or "etherization" (Vergeistigung). At the same time, it becomes clear why one and only one of the symbolic forms "mixes" with similar ones. In its development from imitative to symbolic expression, it covers the whole expanding scale in which each of the other forms occupies a certain place. Language passes through all phases of the development of the mind to freedom, while other forms are in one phase; here's how-

They are, to some extent, mutually exclusive. In addition to being independent areas of expression, they mark "stages in a life's journey."

With a mythological picture of the world, we are at the starting point of the path. Thanks to the operation of the principle of "fusion", the meaning here exists only as a materialized, bound by a sensual substrate. At the point furthest from myth lies knowledge, the end of the road. Here spiritualization has reached its completion, and the philosophy of symbolic forms, being itself a type of knowledge, tries to adequately express this last achievement. Emphasizing the creative nature of activity in the "positing" of its objects and fighting the "theory of reflection" in cognition, it requires the spirit to achieve complete freedom. Knowing itself in its work, the mind has achieved the reward for its longest journey.

Two intermediate stages link the beginning and the end. They did not receive full development from Cassirer. But the allusions to them in the concluding section of the second volume, entitled "The Dialectic of the Mythological Consciousness," are explicit enough to help us complete our "dynamic diagram" of cultural forms. Life, reviving the mythological consciousness, strives to break free beyond the limits of the world of myth. This new freedom is acquired in religion. But, renouncing the materiality that the principle of fusion imposes on the mythological consciousness, religion, nevertheless, remains true to the sensual substratum. Its spirituality, defined by a movement towards mysticism, is balanced by an equally lively attachment to the world of sacred images. This tension between incorporeal spirituality and figurative concreteness subsides, although not completely resolved, in another type of symbolic expression - in art. Through works of art, the meaning forms its external form, filling it to the brim with expressiveness, without overflowing and making it completely alive. But at the same time, this appearance is nothing more than an image, “appearance”. It renounces claims to objective reality in the context of practical life.

The myth appears as a prelude, followed by the triad of religion, art and knowledge. Undoubtedly, this is the rhythm of "Absolute Spirit" according to Hegel 24 . At the same time, it becomes clear why the evolutionary impulse that runs through philosophical views Hegel, should remain a subordinate and undeveloped sign in Cassirer - "repressed dynamism", as we called it. At full swing, this dynamic element, a destructive force, will blur the foundations of the Symbolic Forms.

Cassirer's symbolic forms are mostly independent structures considered in juxtaposition. Each of them is animated by an immanent, unique "direction of creativity." If we emphasize the dynamic property by imagining a succession of forms, this immanence, independence, and static self-sufficiency of the Form taken by itself is called into question.

Cassirer is well aware of this danger and warns us not to confuse his "three phases" with the law. three stages Auguste Comte 25 . The latter scheme, he writes, does not allow a purely immanent assessment of the achievements of the mythological-religious consciousness. In fact, for Cassirer, even arguing the problem of the dynamic self-transcendence of Symbolic Forms is a risky undertaking. In doing so, he encourages the rejection of his principle of "purely immanent evaluation" and thus finds himself under a barrage of uncomfortable questions. How is it possible to harmonize the Forms as equal if it is known that one of them - knowledge - contains the others? What about the truth claimed by a religion, or rather, each particular religion? Could it be that transcendental analysis imperceptibly removes this requirement, although it gives religion some meaningful structure? Further, is not the transition from myth to religion, and perhaps from religion to science, or from primitive to pure religion, the progress of civilized life - from miserable errors and prejudices to wisdom and bliss, dubious, but still real? And isn't progress, understood in this way, something more than Cassirer's? Not a weak dialectic that transfers the spirit from one closed Form to another, but the Promethean act of a man that made him a man - culture in the full sense of the word?

In these questions we can easily recognize the voice of the importunate questioner who, at the beginning of our analysis, appeared with his naive questions about culture, only to find that Cassirer's philosophy did not provide answers to them. Now we can explain why there are no such answers.

The area in which the dynamic interconnectedness of Symbolic Forms unfolds, one might say, the scope of their orderly unification into an all-encompassing picture of cooperation - this area is the mind of a particular individual living his own life. own life and at the same time participating in the life of civilization. The choice between good and evil is entrusted to him, poor fellow. For him, the lucky man, for his pleasure, the products of civilization are produced. He will not be satisfied to learn that the story of Faust, as a myth, exhibits some of the features typical of "mythological thinking." He wants to know if she represents, perhaps, the truth. The fact that a religion oscillates between mystical spirituality and figurative concreteness will be for him only a preliminary statement leading to more precise questions: does the idea of ​​"original sin" taught by one of the religions - Christianity - correspond to what we know about human life? It is he, a concretely existing individual, who asks all these annoying questions. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle worked for him, for his improvement and improvement, and after them - the philosophers of the Middle Ages and the New Age, including, of course, Kant. But never and under no circumstances is he allowed into the territory of neo-Kantian thought. Where, we ask, is the place for ethics and political philosophy

within Symbolic Forms? For Cassirer, life comes into view only as vita acta,"the life that is lived" and never like vita agenda,"life as it should be lived." This explains the quiet perfection of his thought, as well as its inevitable limitations. He is not in a fight, all the while breathing the air of contemplative detachment. But how such clarity is achieved, his philosophy does not say.

Once Cassirer brings in a gloomy note. His analysis of the logic of the humanities ends with a chapter called "The Tragedy of Culture" full of profound thoughts. We are invited to look at the wide panorama of how "critical philosophy" opens it. With one glance, we embrace the Symbolic Forms, a solemn array of structures that highlight the endless possibilities of the creative mind. Their austere architecture rises above an element of boundless mobility, a whirlwind of continuous change: the flow of life through time. In short moments of creativity, this flow stops. It crystallizes into forms that temporarily fill bottomless vessels with the reality of life: languages ​​become distinct, religions seek and find faith, works of art spread delight, philosophies express truth. But life is a change of creation and destruction. The creations of man, the works of culture, bask in the clear light of history for a short time, only to return to where they came from. This, according to Cassirer, is the tragedy of culture.

Is this transience really tragic, the reader asks. Of course, it lies in the nature of things, and it leaves immobile the grandiose constancy of the Symbolic Forms. The philosophical lamentation of mortality is reminiscent of a well-known early treatment of the theme:

The sons of men are like the leaves in the woody oak forests: The wind blows some over the earth, the other oak forest, Blooming again, gives birth, and grows with the new spring; So are men: these are born, those perish*.

We ask again why the frailty of man should be a cause for grief. The forest survives, and humanity survives, but both can survive only by experiencing an endless series of deaths.

The answer to our question in both cases will be the same, or almost the same. For an Ionian poet who sings at the dawn of Hellenic culture, the change of generations is tragic, because it only awakens a self-conscious individual, longing for eternity. For a scientist in the XX century. the boundless significance of symbolic structures is not enough to avert tragedy, because the old everlasting desire for a "peace without end" is still alive. The individual has not been completely disposed of. His ghostly presence fills the great indifference to the philosophy of Symbolic Forms with an elegiac mood.

* Iliad, Song Six, 146-149, translated by N.I. Gnedich.

Notes

1 Aristotle. Metaphysics, YuOZa 21.

2 Diels H. Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. 5. Ausg., I, 231, fr. 3.

3 Kant L Critique of Pure Reason, L., 1929. P. 194.

4 Philosophie der symbolischen Formen [Philosophy of symbolic forms - hereinafter FSF], I, 3.

5 Ibid., Ill, 368.

6 Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, typescript. P. 37.

7 FSF, I, 5.

8 De Anima, 43oa 3-4.

9 Critique of Pure Reason, 22.

11 Cohen H. Ethik des reinen Willens (1904), 93.

12 Logik der Kulturwissenschaften, 61.

13 Dieb H. Op. cit., I, 239, fr. 8, 50-61.

14 Cohen H. Logik der reinen Erkenntnis. 3. Ausg., 1922. 83f. |5 FSF, I, 11.

16 Cohen H. Logik.., 33.

17 Goethe. Faust. Prologue in the sky. Per. N. Kholodkovsky. M, 1954.

18 Diels H. Op. cit., I, 237, fr. 8, 26f.

19 Sophist, 241 d.

20 Logik.., 89-93.

21 FSF, H, 83.

22 "Politics", 1253a 10. 23 FSF, I, 137f.

24 Wed. Hegel. Encyclopedia, 553-577.

25 FSF, II, 291.

Translation from English, language completed BEFORE. Kuznetsov by edition: Kuhn H. Ernst Cassirer "s Philosophy of Culture // The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer. N.Y., 1958. P. 547-574. Translated into Russian for the first time.

Susan K. Langer

De Profimdis*

The most original and perhaps the most important contribution of Ernst Cassirer to philosophy is his study of various forms of symbolic representation and representation, which underlie the functions of the spirit that are unique to man, such as imagination, the formulation of concepts, speech, as well as logical intuitions, gradually passing from their primitive initial stage into discursive reflections. The study of language and verbal symbolism is not new, but the idea of ​​non-verbal symbolic forms, of codes that replace words, such as pictographic writing, sign language, etc., is essentially a product of our century. For philosophers, this idea is associated mainly with the name of Ernst Cassirer; for psychologists, especially psychiatrists, and for the educated public - with the name of Sigmund Freud.

It is difficult to find thinkers as different from each other as these two. Both of them were creative and erudite people whose accomplishments would be difficult to summarize briefly (some knowledge of their ideas is assumed here). To the reader of such knowledge it may at first seem strange that these thinkers can be compared at all. Cassirer was a philosopher, epistemologist and metaphysician, oriented on Immanuel Kant; Freud, on the other hand, was a practicing physician whose interest in mental phenomena arose as a result of his clinical research. However, moving along different paths, they both came to the same idea - that the whole experience of mankind is full of symbolic values, and all thinking is permeated with symbolic representations, most of which go beyond consciousness. However, the discovery of the unconscious formation and use of symbols presented these researchers with completely different problems, in the resolution of which they could hardly be of help to each other. Freud believed that his analysis of the motivations underlying neurotic behavior and experiences, which often hide very primitive instinctive attitudes and morally reprehensible passions, which are unconsciously formed and appear mainly in dreams

* From the depths<я воззвал к Тебе, Господи>(the beginning of the penitential psalm - lat.).

as the meanings of symbolic images, reveals the true "human nature", going back to the origins of evolution. He believed that public life covered with a coating of visible rationality and moral aspirations individual existence with its animal needs and impulses. But these impulses, mostly sexual and aggressive, though repressed by accepted duties and decorum, are nonetheless active. He believed that they have a constant influence on the ideas, aspirations and emotions operating at the level of consciousness. Perhaps the fact that these forces, masked by the moral law established by society, which makes them appear "deeper" than the cultural layers that lie above them, led Freud to believe that these forces are "more real" than the values ​​we consciously hold. . These are hereditary, permanent and biological coercive factors.

In his bold attempt to explore the prehistory of human society, to which his work "Totem and Taboo" is devoted ("Totem und Tabu", 1913), he proceeds from the following premise: the "Oedipus complex", which consists in the jealousy experienced by each child for a parent of the same sex with him because of a parent of the opposite sex, is inherent in the structure family life; such a structure is inevitable because of the surprisingly long human infantilism, which forces the stage of maternal care for one child to lead to the birth of the next. From the subjective state generated in the child by the model family relations Freud deduced the origin of the elaborate customs of totemism found in Australian, Melanesian and North American tribal formations. He believed that the syndrome of schizophrenia, usually found in representatives of civilized societies, is a regression to the primitive basis of all the rules and rituals gradually created by mankind in order to avoid conflicts constantly lurking in the family.

Meanwhile, Cassirer discovered another range of issues related to the discovery that symbolic forms are produced by the unconscious work of the psyche and are recognized as spontaneous, independent images or dreams that are not perceived as symbols. Cassirer was interested in the epistemological problems of the origin and function of this kind of symbolism, which hardly served communication, which is the main purpose of recognizing such symbols as words. His interest was more in the peculiar way in which these products of the imagination are combined and convey different meanings, rather than in their specific meanings, Freud believed that they are always concrete descriptions; Cassirer, on the other hand, noted that they, in essence, perform the functions of metaphors directed directly to the mental reactions of intuition, no matter how doubtful and imperfect human activity of this kind may be. Very accurately he called them "metaphorical symbols."

The first phase of semantic understanding seems to be nothing more than an experience of meaning, making possible the emergence of indefinite conceptual content as a quality rather than a meaning; the subjective aspect is a strong emotional feeling caused by an expressive form - a proto-symbol. Feeling is best defined as awe and quality as holiness. Here lies the beginning of religion, myth-making, magical thinking and ritual practice: the establishment of the first symbolic entities and actions, the ability to evoke, concentrate and hold concepts far beyond the limits of one's thinking, perhaps beyond the limits of verbal thinking, i.e., before the appearance of speech - this is the earliest stage of mental activity, immediately preceding the emergence of speech and being its source.

Cassirer certainly shared Freud's interpretation of fantasies as a product of unconscious thought processes. And both researchers came to the conclusion that metaphorical symbols are most often perceived not as expressive forms, but simply as real objects, true stories, effective rituals. However, their ideas never met and did not coincide, because they came to their general ideas by very different mental paths. They moved in different directions: Freud, having discovered how the universally recognized moral values ​​of a civilized (or even primitive) society suppress and mask the unrecognized immoral instinctual impulses and feelings of people, continued to study the various psychiatric symptoms of his patients, going deep into the layers of animal needs and reactions ( aggressive, sexual, insatiable), constituting the content of unadorned, "genuine" human nature; Cassirer, on the basis of his epistemological research in the field of the logic of science, mathematics and verbal communication, tried to trace the path of the evolution of the spirit from its initial stages to the highest peaks that were achieved. If we compare Freud's Totem and Taboo with Cassirer's Language and Myth, Die Begriffsform im mythischen Denken (The Form of Concepts in Mythic Thinking), and above all with the second volume "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms", at first it seems that Freud sought to penetrate to the very roots of culture, which are below the level of the most primitive moral ideal, to "It" ( organic structure work human brain, unconscious as the physiological processes of metabolism, blood circulation and gas exchange), up to what we have inherited from animals; while Cassirer studied the intellect, the judgments of the mind, moral principles, and all those ideas and permissible motives that fill the consciousness, which Freud considered as superficial phenomena that mask manifestations of the animal nature of man that are unacceptable to society.

However, paradoxically, on closer comparison, we come to reassess their symbolic thinking as

contributions to anthropological and evolutionary theory. Freud built his theories on the basis of pathological phenomena, no matter how common they may be in everyday reality (the common cold overtakes us all, but this does not make it a normal and healthy condition). Pathologies are the result of social pressure, and they could not have arisen in the pre-cultural stage of human existence. Evil thoughts and desires, which must be suppressed, can also secretly exist only in society; and although they are always inherent in man, they undoubtedly changed with the development of language and the accompanying abilities of formulation, cognitive abilities and memory, provided that subconscious mental functions, for example, suppression, "mechanisms" of condensation, repression, etc. - change somewhat in the course of evolution. Even the perception in each era is different. Therefore, an appeal to the previous states reveals only an external similarity based on the similarity of some characteristics of the pathological condition. modern man known or supposed characteristics of the normal state that once took place. The wild nature that is revealed when the forces that suppress it are removed by psychoanalysis is not the former healthy one. human nature, but the same primitive component that was suppressed at any stage of culture, and at each one caused the tension between passions and prohibitions, which are the source of human Ideas of good and evil. The early stage of development of any organism, or even of any function, is full of potentiality; turning to the phase of immaturity from a developed state can only imitate a return to it; but it will lack the drive and strength, the process of growth, in which its completion is already laid, which characterizes the embryonic structure and constitutes its supposed image (imago). In a state brought on by aging or pathology, it is impossible to truly reproduce the genesis of normal life, personal or social.

Cassirer's study of unconscious symbol formation led him to a different hypothesis about its main function, namely, to the assumption that this is a normal and healthy, early stage, serving the emergence of ideas that cannot yet be expressed otherwise. In the era of sudden, rapid spiritual growth, when new concepts literally crowd out each other, there comes a flourishing in the creation of fantastic images and beliefs, continuing until these ideas are gradually more or less mastered by a more accurate thought. And nowadays, any really new "concept appears in one or another mythical form. (It is enough to recall at least some of Freud's "forces": It, I, World, Domain, Super-I, which fight each other in the spheres of the Conscious, Preconscious , the Subconscious, feeding on the Unconscious with the help of "energies" taken from some forces and given to others. Freud's concept of the soul was co-

completely new for his time and, of course, for himself; and she represented the only possible way of thinking for him).

In patients with schizophrenia observed by psychiatrists, “regression” to primitive ways of thinking and speaking in specific metaphorical terms can indeed be taken as an appeal to an ancient form of symbolism, to a form of mythical imagination, which includes a personified idea of ​​objects, forces, causes, dangers, and other completely different things. Beings in a state of frustration (not only people) tend to replace in their behavior some other function that is lost or blocked, and in an abnormal situation behave abnormally to achieve their goals. This is the meaning of the saying "Necessity will teach everything" [in Russian: "need for inventions is cunning"]. But need generates only the use of already existing means for new needs; it will never cause the creation of really new potentialities; real innovations are formed only during the evolutionary process, and appear because they are ready, and not because they are needed. And even the most ancient dream, created by symbolism in response to suppression, could only arise within a certain cultural system, where the needs of society already serve to suppress the direct implementation of sexual or any other animal impulses.

Cassirer in his interpretation does not refute Freud's concept and does not deny its clinical significance. It confirms Freud's conclusions about the depth and obscurity of spontaneous symbol formation. But Cassirer's concept does not show that the moral fears of the main "It-functions" are the motivating factor of this process in phylogeny, at the first stage of symbolic thinking. Such fears arise only with the development of the "I", i.e. with the development of language, in society. His extrapolation into the past of the psychological stages that are today found in the origin of new intellectual perspectives led him to an understanding of the phenomenon, to the consciousness of the metaphorical symbol as such; in his reflections, he passed from one normal function to another, a hypothetical primitive, included in the creation of thought itself. This proto-symbolism, according to his view, may have first appeared in emotion-generated ritual, mystical and magical, but - in contrast to the neurotic's forced ritualized practice - not subjective, personal or private, but objective and social, and with the rise of tribal formations - morally sanctioned. It continues to exist in the era of the emergence of the language and provides communication material in communicating with people, provides the structure of myth and religion. This is the beginning of intelligent life. As a normal phenomenon of phylogeny it has a supposed future, such as an ad hoc defense mechanism would hardly have.

* For this case (lat.).

So the comparison of the anthropological speculations of Freud and Cassirer takes an unexpected turn: Freud thought he had come to.?

the very "roots" of human nature, while Cassirer was engaged in the study of those higher spiritual processes that seemed to the psychoanalyst to be deceptive "rationalizations" of irrational instinctive actions. However, the academic philosopher considered in essence the most ancient form of symbolic expression more broadly and anthropologically; and, in tracing back the growth of the human intellect, he may have delved deeper into its origins in metaphorical proto-symbolism than did Freud, who studied pathological recourse to the same tool as a way out of suffering. Cassirer's reflections on the unconscious processes of presenting ideas (sometimes very abstract) in hidden mental images full of extraordinary emotional values ​​allowed him to penetrate not so much into biologically determined needs and stresses as into the stage of development of feeling, understanding, imagination, intuition of meaning, and finally , into the conscious construction of formally related concepts and their expression in words, whereby the human mind evolved from humble but still human beginnings into articulated thinking, the source of science, justice, social control (good and evil) and - at the present time of all phenomenology knowledge.

Translation from of English language completed I.A. Osinovskaya by edition: Langer S.K. De Profundis // Revue internationale de philosophie. Bruxelles (Cassirer) No. 110, 1974 - fasc. 4, 28 e annee.

Culturology: Lecture Notes by Dilnara Enikeeva

LECTURE No. 17. Philosophy of symbolic forms by E. Cassirer

Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) - German Jew, neo-Kantian philosopher. E. Cassirer is a student Hermann Cohen, representative of the Markburg school of neo-Kantianism. The main philosophical works are "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms", "Experience about Man", "Cognition of Reality".

Neo-Kantianism - the most influential philosophical movement late XIX- the beginning of the XX century. Representatives of neo-Kantianism initially argued with philosophers who revealed the concept of the philosophy of culture from the standpoint of the “philosophy of life” (Life, i.e., the primary reality before any separation, is self-limiting through forms emanating from it, forming “more-life” and “more-than -life" or forms of culture). Gradually there is a mutual influence and convergence of these two schools, explained by the commonality of themes (the originality of culture, contradictions, its crisis) and the unity of the original philosophical tradition. The influence of romanticism on neo-Kantianism was very significant. So, its early representative F. D. Lange argued that only separate parts of the world of phenomena are accessible to knowledge, while the whole is the subject of creative fiction, which is a necessary product of the spirit, growing from the deepest vital roots of our kind. The integration function in culture is performed by metaphysics, interpreted by F. D. Lange as “the poetry of concepts”.

In 1923–1929 E. Cassirer published his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. By analogy with the questions of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" ("how is mathematical natural science possible?"), he raises the question "how is culture possible?". According to E. Cassirer, it is revealed to us as a variety of symbolic forms, connected and ordered in accordance with their functional roles into a system of modes and levels, each of which (language, myth, science) is not reducible to another and equally exists in its world. The “symbolic form” itself is defined as an a priori (i.e., pre-experimental) ability that creates all the diversity of culture; symbolic forms are autonomous and self-sufficient. The task of the philosophy of culture, in the understanding of E. Cassirer, is to describe the structural levels and "indices of modality", symbolic forms. That allows you to understand the originality, for example, of space and time in the context of science, myth or language.

The main thesis of his main 4-volume work "Philosophy of Symbolic Forms" is as follows: the main significance for the theory of knowledge is the analysis of mythological thinking. E. Cassirer builds his concept of myth from considering it as having its own internal structure. He writes: "The fact that myth is intrinsically and necessarily connected with the general task of phenomenology follows indirectly from Hegel's own formulation and definition of this concept." From this position it follows that the myth occupies a certain place in the phenomenology of the spirit.

In his work, E. Cassirer refers to G. Hegel and adopts his formulations. In addition, there are references to I. Kant.

The first work relating to his conception of the philosophy of symbolic forms is "The concept of symbolic form in the structure of the sciences of the spirit." The main position - the unity of any sphere can be established on the basis of any function. E. Cassirer compares various spheres of cultural creativity - the mythological sphere and aesthetic activity. He says it's wrong to label myth as pseudoscience. The myth also has a causal relationship. Only myth speaks of the connection of things, while science speaks of the nature of the change within each thing.

Here the philosopher refers to the genesis of language. He believes that the scientific form is the highest form of language development (categorical, conceptual form).

The second work related to the concept of symbolic forms is "On the Question of the Logic of Symbolic Concepts". E. Cassirer speaks of two types of logic: analytical (logic of identity) and synthetic (logic of relations).

The first logic, in his opinion, was discovered by the Hellenes. Thus, for example, Plato introduces the syncretic logic of difference.

Another article "Naturalistic and humanistic foundations of the philosophy of culture." The philosophy of culture is an independent sphere. E. Cassirer identifies 3 approaches that exist in the history of the philosophy of culture, which incompletely reveal the meaning of the philosophy of culture:

1) physicalism (positivism);

2) psychologism (O. Spengler);

3) metaphysical foundations (G. Hegel).

If the first approach completely ignores the inner world of a person, the creative subjectivity of the “I”, then O. Spengler, on the contrary, seeks the justification of culture through the intuitive characteristics of the soul. G. Hegel strives to present a creative, free personality, but his freedom is relegated to the transcendental sphere.

"The logic of the sciences of culture" - here E. Cassirer refers to the traditional division of the sciences into natural and cultural. There are two objects of perception - the natural and human world. The nature of the experience and perception of nature and man are different. There is a subject and emotional perception of a person. E. Cassirer prefers emotional perception. These two different streams of cognition have different outcomes—two different processes of concept formation—reflexive and productive.

"Experience about Man"

E. Cassirer starts from the concept of man as an active being, producing certain meanings, symbols. The most important characteristic of a person is activity; it is labor that defines the realm of the human. Language, myth, science, history make up the space of his activity, these are some tools that are functionally used by a person to generate a symbol.

Basic forms of human activity

Myth. E. Cassirer compares the myth with other activities:

1) myth and religion;

2) myth and art.

Myth as a system of depicting the surrounding world in this sense approaches art. However, their essential difference lies in the object of knowledge. Mythological thinking makes its object alive. As for the concept of the origin of the myth, E. Cassirer is a supporter of the activity approach to the analysis of culture, in his opinion, first there was a ritual, and then a word.

Religion and myth. Religion overcomes myth, but this overcoming is incomplete. Their difference lies in the taboo system: if in myth the taboo system is passive-prohibitive in nature, then in religion the system of prohibition is of a different nature. It exists not to scare, but to lead to the gifts of God, to bright prospects.

Language, according to E. Cassirer, these are:

1) activity, energy, process (becoming);

2) result, product (become).

According to E. Cassirer, language is movement, development, therefore there is no original parent language.

Art is either a purely naturalistic depiction of reality, or fiction. Art and science describe the same reality in different ways. Science, as it were, reduces the object of reality, while in art there is an intensification. The scientist discovers facts and laws, the artist discovers the forms of nature (“Works of art are a corner of nature, seen through temperament,” argued E. Zola).

Story. E. Cassirer compares historical knowledge with natural science. The difference is that a physical fact can be experimentally verified, but a historical fact is the past and cannot be measured. E. Cassirer believes that the difference between this knowledge is not in the logic of thinking, but in the object. According to the philosopher, history is no less objective than the natural sciences.

The science. The specificity of science is that it fixes stable points, fixed poles and special role number plays in this process.

Thus, labor E. Cassirer is an attempt to overcome the crisis of neo-Kantianism by bringing it into a new, culturological problematic field.

From the book The Story of Beauty [Excerpts] by Eco Umberto

From the book Culturology: Lecture Notes author Enikeeva Dilnara

LECTURE No. 16. Philosophy of culture: methodological foundations First of all, it should be noted the connection between cultural studies and philosophy. On the one hand, culturology, standing out from philosophy, acts as a style of philosophizing. Philosophizing and its results are only

From the book General Sociology author Gorbunova Marina Yurievna

23. Cultural universals and diversity of cultural forms Cultural universals. J. Murdoch singled out common features common to all cultures. These include: 1) joint work; 2) sports; 3) education; 4) the presence of rituals; 5) kinship systems; 6) rules of interaction

From the book Culturology (lecture notes) the author Halin K E

Lecture 2. Culturology and philosophy of culture, sociology of culture became a philosophy of culture. This created the condition for the formation in this

From the book Fundamentals of Drawing for students in grades 5-8 author Sokolnikova Natalya Mikhailovna

From the book Tale of Prose. Reflections and analysis author Shklovsky Viktor Borisovich

On the repetition of old forms

From the book Selected Works on Linguistics author Humboldt Wilhelm von

From the book of Umberto Eco: paradoxes of interpretation author Usmanova Almira Rifovna

Apology for the aesthetics of serial forms For Eco, as for the French theorist Edgar Morin in his time, there is nothing criminal in the fact that the critic secretly enjoys the object of his own analysis and admires how masterfully it is done. But what is the relationship

From the book Russia: Criticism of Historical Experience. Volume1 author Akhiezer Alexander Samoilovich

Conservation of archaic forms of labor In the struggle for equalization, those who continued the traditions of “primitive agriculture” constantly won, and those who were looking for new, more progressive, efficient forms of labor perished. The agrarian movement in 1917–1918, which S. Maksudov

From the book "The collapse of idols", or Overcoming temptations author Kantor Vladimir Karlovich

"Philosophy can only exist where there is freedom." Philosophy in the USSR (1960–1980s) (Vladimir Kantor's conversation with Andrei Kolesnikov and Vitaly Kurennoy) What was philosophy in the USSR in the 1960s–1980s? Where did it really exist - in the "underground", in informal groups,

From the book Shamanism author Loiko V. N.

From the book "The Image of the Twentieth... Past and Present" author Turchin Valery Stefanovich

Metamorphoses of Forms by Malevich The "Black Square", shown by Kazimir Malevich at the "Last Futuristic Exhibition 0.10 (zero-ten)" in 1915, still attracts the closest attention. Does it mean only the end of painting, the "zero of forms" or something

From the book Russian prose of the XXI century in criticism. Reflection, evaluation, description technique author Kolyadich Tatyana Mikhailovna

First part Genre paradigm of media forms

From the book Religious Practices in modern Russia author Team of authors

From the book When Fish Meet Birds. people, books, movies author Chantsev Alexander Vladimirovich

From the book Anthropology of the Revolution author Team of authors

100 r first order bonus

Choose the type of work Graduate work Course work Abstract Master's thesis Report on practice Article Report Review Test work Monograph Problem solving Business plan Answers to questions Creative work Essay Drawing Compositions Translation Presentations Typing Other Increasing the uniqueness of the text Candidate's thesis Laboratory work Help on-line

Ask for a price

In the history of philosophy, people have tried to understand with the help of psychological introspection. E. Cassirer proposed an alternative method in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He proceeds from the premise that if there is any definition of the nature or "essence" of man, then this definition can only be understood as functional, not substantial.

The hallmark of a person is his activity. A "philosophy of man" is, therefore, such a philosophy that should clarify for us the fundamental structures of each of the types of human activity and at the same time make it possible to understand it as an organic whole. Language, art, myth, religion - these are not random, isolated creations, they are connected by common ties. As for the philosophy of culture, E. Cassirer begins with the assertion that the world of human culture is not just an accumulation of vague and scattered facts.

From an empirical or historical point of view, it seems that it is enough to collect the facts of human culture in order to unravel the phenomenon itself. E. Cassirer prefers the thesis of the fragmentation of human culture, its initial heterogeneity. According to E. Cassirer, human culture in its entirety can be described as a process of consistent self-liberation of a person. Language, art, religion, science are the various stages of this process.

“Partial loss (weakness, insufficiency, damage) of communication with the environment (defect in the plan of activity) and with their own kind (defect in the plan of relations) is initial alienation, excluding the primordial human from the natural totality. This collision is deeply tragic. As a tragedy, it is comprehended in the myth of the expulsion of the first people from paradise, and the idea of ​​the loss of both the plan of activity (“eating the forbidden fruit”) and the plan of relations in the community (“original sin”) is metaphorically embodied in the myth. “Driven out” of the natural totality, having become a “freedman of nature,” as Herder called man, the primal man turns out to be a free being, that is, capable of ignoring the “standards of the species,” transgressing taboos and prohibitions that are immutable for “full-fledged” animals, but only negatively free: not having positive program of existence"

Sociality, cultural standards dictate to a person other than the biological program, patterns of behavior. Instincts in a person are weakened, superseded by purely human needs and motives, in other words, "cultivated". Is the dulling of instincts really a product of historical development? Recent research refutes this conclusion. It turns out that the weak expression of instincts is not at all caused by the development of sociality. There is no direct link here.

Man has always and regardless of culture possessed "muffled" undeveloped instincts. The species as a whole had only the beginnings of an unconscious natural orientation that helps to listen to the voice of the earth. The idea that man is ill-equipped with instincts, that his forms of behavior are painfully arbitrary, has had a tremendous influence on theoretical thought. Philosophical anthropologists of the 20th century drew attention to the well-known “insufficiency” of the human being, to some features of its biological nature.

For example, A. Gelen believed that the animal-biological organization of a person contains a certain "unfulfillment". However, the same A. Gehlen was far from the idea that a person is doomed on this basis, forced to become a victim of evolution. On the contrary, he argued that a person is not able to live according to the ready-made standards of nature, which obliges him to look for other ways of existence.

As for man as a generic being, he was naturally, instinctively deaf and blind. Man, as a biological being, turned out to be doomed to extinction, because the instincts in him were poorly developed even before the advent of social history. He was sentenced to search extreme ways survival not only as a representative of society, but also as an animal.

However, nature is able to offer every living species many chances. There was such a chance for a person. Not having a clear instinctive program, not knowing how to behave in specific natural conditions for the benefit of himself, a person unconsciously began to look closely at other animals, more firmly rooted in nature. He seemed to have gone beyond the scope of the species program. This manifested his inherent “speciality”, because many creatures were unable to overcome their own natural limitations and died out.

But in order to imitate animals, some flashes of consciousness are needed? No, not needed at all. The human capacity for imitation is not exceptional. The monkey, the parrot has this gift. However, in combination with a weakened instinctive program, the tendency to imitate had far-reaching consequences. It has changed the very way of human existence. Therefore, in order to reveal the specificity of a person as a living being, it is not human nature in itself that is important, but the way of its being.

So man unconsciously imitated animals. This was not inherent in the instinct, but it turned out to be a saving property. Turning, as it were, into one, then into another creature, as a result, he not only withstood, but gradually developed a certain system of guidelines that were built on top of instincts, supplementing them in their own way. The defect eventually turned into a certain dignity, into an independent and original means of adaptation to the environment.

In the history of philosophy, people have tried to understand with the help of psychological introspection. E. Cassirer proposed an alternative method in the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. He proceeds from the premise that if there is any definition of the nature or "essence" of man, then this definition can only be understood as functional, not substantial.

The hallmark of a person is his activity. "Philosophy of man", therefore, such a philosophy, which should clarify for us the fundamental structures of each of the types of human activity and at the same time make it possible to understand it as an organic chain.Language,art,myth,religion - these are not random, isolated creations, they are connected by common ties. As for the philosophy of culture, Cassirer begins it with the assertion that the world of human culture is not just an accumulation of vague and scattered facts.

From an empirical or historical point of view, it seems that it is enough to collect the facts of human culture in order to unravel the phenomenon itself. Cassirer prefers the thesis of the fragmentation of human culture, its initial heterogeneity. According to Cassirer, human culture in its entirety can be described as a process of man's gradual self-liberation. Language, art, religion, science are the various stages of this process.

If Fink believes that cult, myth, religion, since they are of human origin, as well as art, are rooted in the existential phenomenon of the game, then Cassirer derives the phenomenon of culture from the fact of the imperfection of the biological nature of man. Man has lost his original nature. We cannot say why this happened. Scientists talk about the influence of cosmic radiation or radioactivity, deposits of radioactive ores that caused mutations in the mechanism of heredity. A similar regression - the extinction, weakening or loss of certain instincts - is not, generally speaking, absolutely unknown to the natural world.

“Partial loss (weakness, insufficiency, damage) of communication with the environment (defect in the plan of activity) and with their own kind (defect in the plan of relations) is initial alienation, which excluded the primordial human from the natural totality. This collision is deeply tragic. As a tragedy, it is comprehended in the myth of the expulsion of the first people from paradise, and the myth metaphorically embodies the idea of ​​the Loss of both the plan of activity (“eating the forbidden fruit”) and the plan of relations in the community (“original sin”). “Driven out” from the natural totality, having become a “freedman of nature,” as Herder called man, the primordial man turns out to be a free being, that is, capable of ignoring the “species standards”, transgressing taboos and prohibitions that are immutable for “full-fledged” animals, but only negatively free: not having positive program of existence" (Wilchek Sun.).

Sociality, cultural standards dictate to a person other than the biological program, patterns of behavior. Instincts in a person are weakened, superseded by purely human needs and motives, in other words, "cultivated". Is the dulling of instincts really a product of historical development? Recent research refutes this conclusion. It turns out that the weak expression of instincts is not at all caused by the development of sociality. There is no direct link here.

Man has always and regardless of culture possessed "muffled" undeveloped instincts. The species as a whole had only the beginnings of an unconscious natural orientation that helps to listen to the voice of the earth. The idea that man is ill-equipped with instincts, that his forms of behavior are painfully arbitrary, has had a tremendous influence on theoretical thought. Philosophical anthropologists of the 20th century drew attention to the well-known "insufficiency" of the human being, to some features of its biological nature.

For example, A. Gelen believed that the animal-biological organization of a person contains a certain “unfulfillment”. However, the same Gehlen was far from the idea that a person is doomed on this basis, forced to become a victim of evolution. On the contrary, he argued that a person is not able to live according to the ready-made standards of nature, which obliges him to look for other ways of existence. Compare with Tyutchev:

Others inherited from nature

Instinct is prophetically blind, -

They can smell and hear the waters

And in the dark depths of the earth ...

As for man as a generic being, he was naturally instinctively deaf and blind... Man, as a biological being, turned out to be doomed to extinction, because his instincts were poorly developed even before the advent of social history. Not only as a representative of society, he was condemned to search for extreme ways to survive, but also as an animal.

However, nature is able to offer every living species a number of chances. There was such a chance for a person. Not having a clear instinctive program, not knowing how to behave in specific natural conditions for the benefit of himself, a person unconsciously began to look closely at other animals, more firmly rooted in nature. He seemed to have gone beyond the scope of the species program. This manifested his inherent “speciality”; after all, many other creatures failed to overcome their own natural limitations and died out.

But in order to imitate animals, some flashes of consciousness are needed? No, not needed at all. The human capacity for imitation is not exceptional. A monkey, a parrot have this gift... However, in combination with a weakened instinctive program, the tendency to imitate had far-reaching consequences. It has changed the very way of human existence. Therefore, to reveal the specificity of a person as a living being, it is not human nature in itself that is important, but the forms of its being.

So man unconsciously imitated animals. This was not inherent in the instinct, but it turned out to be a saving property. Turning, as it were, into one, then into another creature, as a result, he not only resisted, but gradually developed a certain system of guidelines that were built on top of instincts, supplementing them in their own way. The defect gradually turned into a certain dignity, into an independent and original means of adaptation to the environment.

“A person is doomed to all the time,” writes Yu.N. Davydov, - to restore the broken connection with the universe ... ". The restoration of this violation is the replacement of instinct by the principle of culture, that is, the orientation towards culturally significant objects. The concept of a symbolic, game adaptation to the natural world was developed in the works of E. Cassirer. We also note that the socio-cultural orientation of philosophy has sharpened interest in the category of a symbol, symbolic. The symbolic has become a fundamental concept of modern philosophy, along with such as science, myth, telos, language, subject, etc.

The field of symbolic research is large: philosophical hermeneutics (G. Gadamer), philosophy of culture (I. Huizinga), philosophy of symbolic forms (E. Cassirer), archetypes of the collective unconscious (C. Jung), philosophy of language (L. Wittgenstein, J. Lacan and etc.). Studies of the symbolic are presented in the concept of symbolic interactionism (J. Mead, G. Bloomer, I. Boffman), where the symbolic is considered as a “generalized other”.

Cassirer outlines approaches to a holistic view of human existence as flowing in symbolic forms. He turns to the works of the biologist I. Yukskyl, a consistent supporter of vitalism. The scientist views life as an autonomous entity. Each biological species, Yukskyl developed his concept, lives in a special world, inaccessible to all other species. So man comprehended the world according to his own standards.

Uexkul begins with the study of lower organisms and successively extends their models to other forms of organic life. According to him, life is equally perfect everywhere: in the small and in the great. Each organism, the biologist notes, has a system of receptors and a system of effectors. These two systems are in a state of known equilibrium.

Is it possible, asks Cassirer, to apply these principles to the human species? Probably, it is possible to the extent that it remains a biological organism. However, the human world is something qualitatively different, since a third system develops between the receptor and effector systems, a special link connecting them, which can be called the symbolic universe. Because of this, a person lives not only in a richer, but also qualitatively different world, in a new dimension of reality.

Animals react directly to an external stimulus, while in humans this response must still be mentally processed. Man no longer lives only in the physical, but also symbolic universe. This is a symbolic world of mythology, language, art and science, which is woven around a person into a strong network. Further progress of culture only strengthens this network.

Cassirer notes the symbolic way of communication with the world in humans, which is different from the sign signaling systems inherent in animals. Signals are part of the physical world, while symbols, being deprived, according to the author, of natural, or substantial, being, have, first of all, functional value. Animals are limited by the world of their sensory perceptions, which reduces their actions to direct reactions to external stimuli. Therefore, animals are not able to form the idea of ​​the possible. On the other hand, for the superhuman intellect or for the divine spirit, as Cassirer notes, there is no difference between reality and possibility: everything mental becomes reality for him. And only in the human intellect is there both reality and possibility.

For primitive thinking, Cassirer believes, it is very difficult to distinguish between the spheres of being and meaning, they are constantly mixed, as a result of which the symbol is endowed with magical or physical power. However, in the course of the further development of culture, the relationship between things and symbols becomes clearer, just as the relationship between possibility and reality becomes clearer. On the other hand, whenever there are obstacles in the way of symbolic thinking, the distinction between reality and possibility also ceases to be clearly perceived.

That's where, it turns out, the social program was born! Initially, it arose from nature itself, from an attempt to survive, imitating animals that are more rooted in their natural environment. Then a special system began to take shape in a person. He became the creator and creator of symbols. They reflected an attempt to consolidate the various standards of behavior suggested by other living beings.

Thus, we have every reason to consider man an "incomplete animal." It was not at all through the inheritance of acquired traits that he broke away from the animal kingdom. For anthropology, the mind and everything that occupies it belongs to the field of culture. Culture is not inherited genetically. A logical conclusion follows from the above reasoning: the secret of culture is not rooted in the formation of man as a symbolic animal.

Literature

Boroday Yu.M., Psychoanalysis and "mass Art / Mass culture: illusions and reality", M., 1975, C, 139-183.

Vilchek V.M., Farewell to Marx: Algorithms of history.-M., 1993.

Gurevich P.S., Ernst Cassirer: phenomenology of myth / Philosophical Sciences, 1991, No. 7, P. 91‑97.

Gurevich P.S., Sultanova M.A., Pioneer of the Philosophy of Symbolism / Philosophical Sciences, 1993, No. 4-6, C, 100-116.

Tavrizyan G.M., O.Spengler, I.Heyzinga: two concepts of the crisis of culture, M., 1989.

Review questions

1. What are the difficulties of the instrumental evolutionary concept of cultural genesis

2. Is it possible to explain culture from naturalistic premises?

3. Is it true that only a human can play?

4. Why did culture, having arisen from the game, moved away from it?

5. What explains the emergence of taboos and totems in culture?

6. How can you reveal the formula: “man is a symbolic animal”?