For Rakesh on Cassirer, Revolution, and Marx.
You know I didn't respond very thoroughly to your post on Cassirer, revolutions in thought and Marx, but I've been thinking on it ever since.
The question of whether Cassirer can add to a perspective on Marx and intellectual revolutions is something of a big deal, if you take it seriously. Part of the problem comes from Cassirer's own intellectual center. He was predominately an historical idealist, in the sense that he considered that the primary problem of knowledge, was knowledge itself; how it was constructed, what it circumscribes about the mind and experience, and how it changes over time within history, and its manifold means of representation---that is its symbolic forms. This central focus lead him to explore ideas by tracing their genealogy, development, and representations. He did this often through developing what amount to intellectual biographies of various philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, writers, and artists. So, he depended heavily on his own ability to read, interpret and then creat an ideational portrait. In a particular sense, the concrete person, their material circumstances, and all the tangible forces of their world, for example, that they might have been freezing to death when they wrote their great work, all these were kept at a distance. He did not investigate the material conditions and ground of his subject or its possible formation from those conditions. Rather, in an idealist realm, ideas as such were predominately seen to be generated from and influenced by other ideational conditions. Now, if you are restricting yourself to a philosophical form of knowledge and understanding, then it becomes a form of naturalism to only investigate and trace out the patterns and figurations of ideas through other ideas.
So, with this view in mind, hopefully that more fully explains what you noticed as an absence in Cassirer:
``I am tempted to study how he made sense of the revolutions in thought effected by personalities....to see if light could be thrown by his methods on Marx. Yet socio-economic determinants or causes hardly ever appear in Cassirer's explanation of the transformations in thought...''
In, The Library of Living Philosophers, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer (Open Court, La Salle, 1949), Cassirer is taken to task on this historical idealism in John Herman Randall's essay, `Cassirer's theory of history as illustrated in his treatment of renaissance thought'. This is a very good critique of Cassirer, from an historian's perspective. But it also raises the question of a philosophy of history. Randall:
``The autonomy of reason, the creativity of the human spirit, der Wille zur Gestalung---this was Cassirer's central vision. It gave him a consuming interest in all the products of the human mind and in the processes by which they have been created---in what he came to call `the universe of symbols'. `History as well as poetry is an organon of our self-knowledge, an indispensable instrument for building up our human universe.' The autonomy of thought was the lesson he learned from history; it was also the principle of interpretation he brought to the past to make it speak to us.
Hence his special interest and love went out to those periods in the past when men were most keenly aware of their own productive powers and responsibility---to those periods in which a creative humanism was most alive, and was forging its weapons....'' (691-2p, LLP)
Notice the central idea is the autonomy of thought. This is a natural conclusion for a philosopher---since if anything, philosophy seems to be the very concrete expression of that idea, that is that thought is autonomous.
Talk is cheap? And yet, I don't believe it, for a minute. Talk is never cheap, and if anything that this stinking period of history, in this stinking country, ruled by these stinking trolls proves, is that the autonomy of thought and speech are utterly circumscribed, if not openly suppressed, steered, controlled and cooked up by every material and cultural means that can be brought to bare on both. But this particular lesson is one from material history, not from an idealist history.
In order to contrast Cassirer's view of art as a universe of symbolic forms, I found the art historian Arnold Hauser was the perfect foil. This is from his introduction to The Philosophy of Art (Knopf, NY, 1958):
...To confine oneself to art [among the ways and means of social organization and the uses of art], it is first of all a tool of magic, a means of ensuring the livelihood of the primitive horde of hunters. Then it becomes an instrument of animistic religion, used to influence good and bad spirits in the interest of the community. Gradually this is transformed into a magnification of the almighty gods and their earthly representatives, by hymn and panegyric, through statues of gods and kings. Finally, in the form of more or less open propaganda, it is employed in the interests of a closed group, a clique, a political party, a social class. Only here and there in times of relative security or of social estrangement of the artists, it withdraws from the world and makes a show of indifference to practical aims, professing to exist for its own sake and for the sake of beauty. But even then it performs an important social function by providing men with a means of expressing their power and their `conspicuous leisure.' Indeed, it achieves much more than that, promoting the interests of a certain social stratum by the mere portrayal and implicit acknowledgment of its moral and aesthetic standards of value. The artist, whose whole livelihood, with all his hopes and prospects, depends upon such a social group, becomes quite unintentionally and unconsciously the mouthpiece of his customers and patrons.
The discovery of the propaganda value of cultural creations, and of art in particular, was made early in human history and exploited to the full, whereas thousands of years passed before man was ready to acknowledge the ideological character of art in terms of an explicit theory, to express the idea that art pursues practical aims either consciously or unconsciously, is either open or veiled propaganda. The philosophers of the French, and even of the Greek enlightenment, discovered the relativity of cultural standards, and doubts regarding the objectivity and ideality of human valuations were expressed again and again in the course of the centuries; Marx, however, was the first to formulate explicitly the conception that spiritual values are political weapons. He taught that every spiritual creation, every scientific notion, every portrayal of reality derives from a certain particular aspect of truth, viewed from the a perspective of social interest, and is accordingly restricted and distorted. But Marx neglected to note that we wage a continual war against such distorting tendencies in our thought, that in spite of the inevitable partialities of our mental outlook, we do possess the power of examining our own thought critically, and so correcting to a certain extent the one-sidedness and error of our views. Every honest attempt to discover the truth and depict things faithfully is a struggle against one's own subjectivity and partiality, one's individual and class interest; one can seek to become aware of these as a source of error, while realizing that they can never be finally excluded. Engles understood this process of pulling oneself out of the mud by one's own bootstraps when he spoke of the `triumph of realism' in Balzac. But no doubt such correcting of our ideological falsification of the truth operates within limits of what is thinkable and imaginable from our place in the world, not in a vacuum of abstract freedom. And the fact that there are such limits objectivity is the ultimate and decisive justification for a sociology of culture; they stop up the last loophole by which we might hope to escape from the influence of social causation.
Apart from its external limitations, the sociology of art also has internal limitations. All art is socially conditioned, but not everything in art is definable in sociological terms...'' (6-9p, TPA)
So, I think between the means of Cassirer above and Hauser below, there is a kind perfect dialectic for historiography. Obviously, art and cultural creations for Hauser are the symbolic universes of form in Cassirer, and these are not limited by either writer to merely the arts per se, but include all forms of thought and expression including mathematics and the sciences, and of course the technological enhancements to all of these, in our age. It is possible to gain all the freedom from determined and limiting conditionalities and keep the liquid qualities of thought and its flows of reason within a symbolic realm with Cassirer, and yet link these to their concrete ground in social, economic, political, and material conditions with Hauser.
I think a more subtle re-working of this contrast between Cassirer and Hauser, reveals a kind of ultimate justification for reading Hegel. It is not that Hegel was so spectacularly correct---since much of the time he was in fact spectacularly mistaken. It is his underlying project, the time bound and dynamic unity of mind and body, and the interpenetrating universes of both, that seems to be such a stunningly rational and realistic direction to take.
I want to add something here for Hauser, which I think he probably gets into, although it could be Cassirer. History may not be literally anything so crass as an expression of world spirit, but the substance of that idea of history, nevertheless contains what I think is its primary social function---that is, a history, is the narrative portrait of a people. In short, history is identity, when the point of view on history is taken as its social function. Hence, history is also a narrative symbolic form that stands in relation to a society, as a particular name and biography stands for a person.
But I want to ground this idea in some material condition, and this is what I think that condition is. In societies which were still embedded in a natural landscape of plants and animals, there are almost always some collection of plants, animals, and places in the landscape that have been chosen to form the narrative identity of the people of the society that inhabits it.
>From the ancient Egyptians to Native Americans in the US, a particular
person was linked through naming with a particular animal or plant or
location. In this sense then their history and their identity was
composed of and through that landscape and those plants and
animals. In societies like our own, where for most people there is no
such thing as a natural world or at least no intimate relation to it,
that same identity function takes up other ensambles composed of other
entities, in which a narrative, which is called a history is created.
Thus for example, I am from Los Angeles, born in the early Forties, and that connotes some vague sort of identity. Yet such a time and place is a completely imaginary construct, since the time is long gone as are most of people and given LA's frenzy for urban renewal so are most of the places. It is a completely symbolic representation.
So, the point here is that history and art have social functions far beyond just their propagandistic aspects which Hauser points out. So, I can turn to Cassirer and find that they serve as both an embodiment of and formative system for the identities that we inhabit.
Now the real weight of this idea can be brought out, when you consider that what we call western civilization, and our identification with its origins in Greece and Rome, is in fact a construction, a narrative that has a specific history. That is, it is a symbolic invention that was put together and given its rough shape during the Renaissance and Enlightenment and has been a vast imaginary project under construction ever since. For the purposes of art history, it is art history. That is to say art history is essentially a vast mythological world that we have created for ourselves and which functions to both configure and animate the entire cosmos of our visual world. There is virtually nothing on tv, in film, video, photography, graphics, design, architecture, or any other visual medium that isn't part of this mythological envelop and that is not also made intelligible to us through it.
Then returning to Hauser we can say that this mythological system is grounded and expressive of the socio-economic forces of our society and serves the interests of those in power. As such, it is the focal point, par execellance, of some of the most powerful and intense of all the forces of political capital.
Chuck Grimes