The Fragmented Humanities: Picking up the Pieces

Whereas his contemporaries in the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism focused primarily on epistemology, logic, and mathematical physics (namely, in the service of the natural sciences), Cassirer stepped outside of these domains in order to deliver a unified theory that can account for both the natural sciences AND what he called the cultural sciences (Kulturwissenschaften). Unlike many of his contemporaries and predecessors since the enlightenment, Cassirer saw science as a whole to be vertically divided into the science of the world around us (natural sciences) and what are now called the humanities. The domain of Kulturwissenschaften includes the areas of anthropology, psychology, religion studies, history, art, philology, and so on.

Cassirer's concern was that while many were eager to give the natural sciences a unified structure and an underlying general theory, such was not the case for the Kulturwissenschaften. Many considered the studies carried out in this domain to be secondary and even illegitimate, mainly due to the lasting influence of Kant's critiques. For Kant, the only species of knowledge that is valid is empirical and strictly rational knowledge. Indeed, this view is not strictly Kantian: it is but an aspect of the naturalistic/mechanistic model that became prevalent during the enlightenment and has dominated scientific thought ever since. Providing a unified theory of knowledge for the sake of giving the natural sciences a legitimate structure and orientation has been one of the primary aims of post-enlightenment epistemology, and especially so for the Marburg school of Neo-Kantianism with which Cassirer is normally associated.

But the Kulturwissenschaften is a different story. In Cassirer's time most of the cultural sciences lacked the theoretical groundwork needed to connect the various fields of study into a unified system. Even now we see the effects of this in the structure of contemporary universities: the various fields of psychology, anthropology, history, literature studies and so on remain severed from each other, and the often praised but seldom practiced interdisciplinarity is but an academic buzzword. Cassirer understood that without providing this theoretical groundwork, not only would the Kulturwissenschaften remain fragmented within itself, it would also remain completely inaccessible to the natural sciences. Cassirer saw it as essential that these two sides of science proper be unified by a general theory, and that the endeavors of Kulturwissenschaften be recognized as equally legitimate. Cassirer's magnum opus, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, can be seen as his main attempt to provide such a unifying theory.

The primary text in which Cassirer considers the intellectual structure of the Kulturwissenschaften is his Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften: Fünf Studien, available in translation by S.G. Lofts from Yale University Press.

Cassirer also works out historically philosophy's failure to establish a unified structure of knowledge in the Fourth Volume of The Problem of Knowledge (Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der Neuren Zeit). Also available from Yale University Press, translated by William H. Woglom.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Logic of the Cultural Sciences: Five Studies. Trans. S.G. Lofts. New Haven: Yale U.P., 2000.

Cassirer, Ernst. The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel. Trans. William H. Woglom. New Haven: Yale U.P., 1969.

A Modest Project

Welcome.

I have created this blog in order to develop my ideas concerning Ernst Cassirer, his work on methodology in cultural and natural sciences, his philosophy of symbolic forms, and his theoretical relation to his Neo-Kantian contemporaries. My posts here will be far from polished. With this blog, it is not my intention to present a unified body of work, nor is it my intention to teach, nor even to impress anyone in particular. Rather, this will be the workshop where I sort out my ideas and impressions as I develop my Master's thesis. That said, coherency and structure will continue to develop as the project progresses.

What about the name? My first posts always explain the blog's name, and such is the case here. The title is a segment from a longer note I had written concerning history and, for lack of a more effective description, the historical process of geist, spirit, working itself out in the ongoing development of human knowledge. I don't mean this to sound so Hegelian, but it will have to suffice for the time being.

The full sentence that this fragment comes from is as follows:

"When the drop of water realizes the ocean, it will not be without the sound of infinite splashing."

Maybe I will describe the note it is from in a subsequent post, but for now I will just say that each of the posts found in this blog will be another splash. Hopefully, with the input of friends and colleagues and my continued posting, something will be realized herein.

Thanks for stopping by...