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75 Chapter 5 Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Nature and Culture The Difference between Natural Concepts and Cultural Concepts In the same period of his thought that Cassirer wrote the manuscript on basis phenomena, he wrote and published his brief work of “five studies ” on The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942). This work goes over much of the same ground that Cassirer treated at length in various parts of the three volumes of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, such as the differences and developmental connections between expression and the intuitive world of things, and the general nature of various of the symbolic forms. In the fifth study Cassirer engages in a brief discussion of the work that mirrors that of his (at the time) unpublished discussion of it as a basis phenomenon. What was Cassirer’s purpose in producing this little book? One answer may be that he wished to call attention to and reaffirm his conception of culture in the turmoil of the times. He was living in Sweden and the European war had become a World War. It was well over a decade since the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms had appeared. In the interim he had devoted himself largely to historical studies, including The Platonic Renaissance in England and the Cambridge School (1932), The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (1932), his collection of five essays on Descartes: Lehre-Persönlichkeit-Wirkung (1939), and Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics (1936). But the central essay of The Logic of the Cultural Sciences treats an issue that was omitted from his phenomenology of knowledge in the third volume of the Philosophy of Symbolic Forms—the theory of cultural concepts. Cassirer’s phenomenology of knowledge concludes with an extensive account of the building-up of scientific knowledge, his reworking of what he had originally presented in Substance and Function, beginning with his restatement of the function-concept in terms of the proposi- 76 chapter  tional function φ(χ) of symbolic logic (PSF 3:301). All of these pages concentrate on an understanding of the exact or mathematical sciences of nature—Naturwissenschaften. There is no discussion of the symbol or the significative function (Bedeutungsfunktion) of consciousness as the basis for the Kulturwissenschaften. Yet the fields that fall under this classification are sciences that presuppose and require the systematic use of symbols achieved only in terms of the viewpoint of theoretical thinking, when consciousness has passed beyond the limits of the intuitive world of representation. The question arises whether the world of human culture is to be understood through the form of the concept as applied to natural phenomena or whether there is a form of the concept distinctive to cultural phenomena. Cassirer holds that there is a fundamental difference between Naturbegriffe and Kulturbegriffe, which is the subject of his third study. There is a logic of cultural concepts that is different in kind from natural concepts . Cassirer points to Vico as the founder of the philosophy of history and, in so doing, the founder of the philosophy of culture. There is a true knowledge of culture to be had that stands alongside the true knowledge of nature such as pursued by Descartes. Cassirer says: “According to Vico, the real goal of our knowledge is not the knowledge of nature but human self-knowledge. . . . For the cardinal rule of knowledge is, according to Vico, the statement that each creature truly understands and penetrates only that which it itself produces. The circle of our knowledge extends no further than the circle of our creative work” (LCS 9). Cassirer finds in Vico a basis for his conception of culture as Werk, a claim which will be treated later in this chapter. Since we make culture and also make a knowledge of culture, cultural science is always an activity of self-knowledge. In a text for one of the sessions of a seminar he taught on the philosophy of history at Yale in 1941–42, “Descartes, Leibniz, and Vico,” Cassirer remarks on how Vico transformed the principle of modern rationalism which led Descartes to exclude history from knowledge into the basis for a knowledge of history itself. “Modern rationalism has often maintained the principle that the human mind can have no adequate conceptions except of those things that are produced by the mind itself and that originate in its own innate powers. Vico adopts this principle, but he gives it a completely new turn and he draws from it the opposite inference” (SMC 103...

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