The Cultural Sciences and Their Basis in Life. On Ernst Cassirer’s Theory of the Cultural Sciences

Abstract

The cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer campaigns for the idea of a unity between natural and cultural science. He polemizes however against the idea of the ‘unified science’ as proclaimed by the ‘Vienna circle’ which favoured physics and the concrete sense perception as the only forms of objectification. The personal-emotional experience of expressive perception which constitutes forms of culture and is therefore the starting point for any cultural science engagement is considered by Cassirer to be an independent and alternative form of objectification of the mind. In his opinion expressive perception genetically precedes the perception of sense qualities. Both types of science are connected by the relations they drawn between the singular and the general. They can be differentiated by their targets – respectively objective laws and subjective shapes or forms. With his use of the emotional expressive perception Cassirer insolubly connects the ‘primary phenomenon of life’ and its appropriate characteristic of the mental live with concept formation within the cultural sciences. His theory of “basis phenomena” as the final modes of the constitution of reality within perception provides a framework for concept formation that is centred around the “basis in life” and the “life feeling”. Forms of life, physiognomic imprinting of sense and epochal character of style are associated in the concepts of the cultural sciences with a specific demand for generality and objectivity which simultaneously differentiates them from the concepts of natural science whilst also equating them.