Abstract
Cassirer’s philosophy of culture has been examined through various disciplines. Until now, however, no such assessment has taken place within the field of economics. In this paper, I attempt to develop this unexplored task through the economic concepts of commodity, money, capital, and culture. I argue that these concepts can help to draw an updated concept of capitalism and power relations created through capitalist planning. I also claim that these concepts can contribute to understanding the historical specificity of capitalist culture, by understanding it as an historical process of social production. I conclude that these concepts are able to defy Cassirer’s view of capitalism as a system in which economic prosperity and political liberty could be achieved in a universal manner. Finally, I demonstrate that these concepts can shed light on Cassirer’s failed quest to find a coherent universal culture within capitalism.
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Notes
I owe much to Skidelsky’s work. However, I aim to work out problems developed by Cassirer from a different perspective in order to contribute to conceptualizing questions that Skidelsky’s book raises, but which, in the author’s own words, he “cannot answer” (Skidelsky 2011, p. 8).
And not just as a generic human capacity to create symbols, as understood by Cassirer.
“his many contributions to the history of science, culture, and epistemology bespoke a robust attachment to the rationalist spirit of the Aufklarung, from Leibniz to Kant, and to the cultural legacy of German classicism, from Goethe to Schiller and Humboldt” (Gordon 2004, pp. 225–226).
“Cassirer suffered the great misfortune to emerge as a stalwart champion of humanism and Enlightenment rationality at the very moment such ideals were falling into eclipse, not only in Germany but arguably across Western Europe as well” (Gordon 2009).
“Political economy is the science which starts from this view of needs and labour but then has the task of explaining mass relationships and mass-movements in their complexity and their qualitative and quantitative character” (Hegel 2008, p. 187).
According to Beiser (2014), there were many attempts during the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany to once again define the subject matter of philosophy. The most famous definitions were: philosophy as the logic of the sciences (Trendelenburg), philosophy as critique (left-wing Hegelians), philosophy as metaphysics (Schopenhauer), philosophy as epistemology (Fischer, Zeller and the Neo-Kantianism), philosophy as the general system of the sciences (Hartmann), philosophy as the science of normativity (Windelband), and philosophy as a worldview (Dilthey).
In the same vein, Skidelsky stated that “The First World War brought an end to that era…The various social and intellectual forces that he had striven to keep together came rapidly apart. Socialists revolted against liberals; liberals turned their guns on socialists. Anti-Semitism spread; young Jews lost faith in assimilation and turned increasingly to Zionism or international Marxism. The intellectual world suffered the same polarization. The “two cultures” fell irretrievably apart; the Naturwissenschaften were given over to a reinvigorated positivism, while the Geisteswissenschaften shaded increasingly into political mysticism” (Skidelsky 2011, p. 42).
I took this characterization from Pablo Levin.
“Cassirer more or less disappeared from philosophical discourse after the Second World War. Only recently, after decades, interest in the philosophy of Cassirer has increased, not only in philosophy, but also in numerous other disciplines” (Coskun 2007, pp. 1–2).
“It is indeed part of the liberty of princes to do as they like about the things in their power; but since money, which is spent all the time now here and now there, belongs to the world, princes have no special authority over it: that is to command it to depart or to remain according to their will. Therefore, money is like the birds (of the air) which no prince can command, to depart or remain in his city or state or realm, as they go to live where they find the best feeding grounds” (Pratisuoli 1604, quoted in Maifreda 2004, p. 127); “let those who read me fix it well in their minds and let them be persuaded that the laws of trade correspond with so great an exactitude to those of gravity and fluids that nothing do so more than they” (Galiani quoted in Maifreda 2004). Romero (1999) explains that the task of formulating those economic laws began in the late middle ages.
Williams (1983) argued that the modern development of the word “culture” has three different meanings: (1) culture as a process of individual enrichment, (2) culture as a group’s “particular way of life,” (Williams 1983, p. 90); (3) “the works and practices of intellectual and especially artistic activity” (Williams 1983, p. 90). These three senses of culture are different, and they compete with one another.
In our interpretation, this economic concept of culture can be extended to the related concepts of Praxeology, which focuses on the generic study of human society and its technical cultures; Ethology, which is a branch of biology devoted to the study of animal cultures; and Evolutive Ecology, which is devoted to understanding human history in the context of natural history (Levin 2010).
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Acknowledgements
This work would not have been possible without the fruitful theoretical discussions I have had with Pablo Levin and my colleagues at CEPLAD, as part of “The Heteronomon” research project. While the present work has a single author, it is important to underline the collective nature of the ideas being developed. Any errors are the sole responsibility of the author.
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Piqué, P. Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture: An Economic Assessment of Scope and Limitations. Found Sci 26, 341–354 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09678-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-020-09678-w