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The Idealistic Foundations of Cultural Anthropology: Vico, Kant and Cassirer EUGENE T. GADOL ERNST CASSIRERAND GIAMBATTISTAVICO are separated by about one hundred and seventy-five years, but in the history of ideas, time spans never preclude intellectual affinities . This is especially true of Cassirer, who was particularly adept in the art of revitalizing the past. Time and again in his voluminous writings, Cassirer comes to appear more Platonic than Plato, more Leibnizean than Leibniz, more Kantian than Kant, and more Hegefian than Hegel. In each of the many figures his historical thought brought to new life, the key to his hermeneuties is a peculiar iconicity.1 Insofar as it was Cassirer's special talent to pick out the typical, original and essential features of a thinker as they emerged from the tradition that gave rise to him, and to incorporate these features into the structure of his own thought while revealing their pertinence to problems of the present , his historical genius was truly iconic. The clash of motifs never interested him per se. It is rather their complex intertwining, leading towards further tensions and resolutions which caught his eye, and these ramifications he masterfuUy traced in a dialectic as complicated as his subject-matter, always focusing on the originating, on the creative currents of thought that opened up new directions as they revealed original turns of mind. In the course of this dialectic, Cassirer, at one time or another, treated every major and many a minor intellectual figure of the Occident, yet there is little of Vico in him. This is understandable, for Cassirer's leading idea was to treat a thinker in relation to his contribution to the problem of knowledge conceived in the broadest sense, and what Vico accomplished in this domain is rather indirect. His chief merit in the history of ideas lies in his posing (rather than solving) questions which others were destined to pursue. This is so especially with problems regarding the proper method of the cultural sciences and humanities. It was Vico who, for the first time in the history of thought, focused on those aspects of poetic, mythic and linguistic phenomena the detailed analysis of which by later thinkers gave rise to the Geisteswissenschaften and to the development of a genuinely philosophical anthropology or philosophy of culture. But his own ideas were nearly choked by the fanciful, Baroque elaborations in which he clothed them. Vico by temperament inclined towards the mystical and prophetic, but his catholic faith prevented him from yieldingto mysticism, just as it prevented him from giving full reign to his rather original and genuinely historical imagination. The unreserved apologetics that course through his works, his bizarre attempts to prove the correctness of dogma and sacred 1 By an icon, I mean a specialtype of symbolwhich shares in someessentialway the structure of what it designates.See my "Reflexivityin History," Proceedings, XlVth International Congress of Philosophy (Vienna: September, 1968),I, 71-80, in which I developthe notion of iconicityand the specialrole it plays in creative (historical)writing. [207] 208 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY history by rather odd and often far-fetched interpretations of the events of profane history , make his relation to the historic and systematic development of the problem of knowledge rather tenuous. Still, there is one problem, the nature of human creativity, which brings Vico close to Cassirer, and the link between them is provided by Kant. In what follows, I endeavor to show how the concept of creativity undergoes a significant change: from its pristine and pre-critical stage, central in Vico's thought, it becomes the subject of self-conscious analysis in Kant, and finally is so generalized by Cassirer, that his entire philosophy may be viewed as one vast ranging study of creativity in the critical (Kantian) sense. I. VICO VICO, THECATHOLICANDMETAPHYSICIAN In all of Vico's works, and particularly in his magnum opus, The New Science, which begins and ends with an appeal to Divine Providence, there speaks a true son of the Church. He shares the fundamental motif of Catholic thought: what is necessary is not to understand this world, but to be delivered from it through faith. He shares the Christian view of human nature...

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