THE RE-ESTABLISHMENT OF "CULTURE"

CASSIRER, ERNST.

Zur Logik der Kulturwissenschaften. Fünf Studien.

Göteborg, 1942. Lex8vo. Uncut in the orig. wrappers. Minor soiling to wrappers and inner hinges, otherwise a clean copy. 139, (1) pp.

Rare first edition of Cassirer's important work on "The Logic of Cultural Science", in which he tries to re-establish the earlier use of the term "culture" in the more narrow sense of the word in order to oppose it to "nature" and protect it against the methodology of natural science that had ruined the conception of the term since the middle/late 19th century and onwards.

In the beginning of the second study of this work (p. 39), Cassirer states that the crisis in which philosophy and science has been found to be since the death of Hegel and Goethe is most evident in the relationship between natural science and cultural science that was prevailing hereafter. Cassirer now differentiates between the cosmos of nature and the cosmos of culture, and he claims that the philosophy that applies to both is no cultural philosophy, but a sort of reflection within the philosophy of science that was to maintain the separate concepts of nature and culture, of natural science and cultural science.
"(N)äher als die Ordnung der Natur steht dem Menschen die Ordnung, die er in seiner eigenen Welt findet. Auch hier hersscht keineswegs blosse Willkür." says Cassirer on the first two pages of the book (pp. 3-4), and from here he goes on to talk about the relationship between nature and culture, which leads on to the question about man (and the "I") and his role in the world, -i.e. the natural and the cultural world; he brings the objective and the subjective together in his notion of art by saying that "Es gehört zu den grössten Leistungen der Kunst, dass sie hierzu fähig ist, dass sie noch in Individuellen das Objektive erfühlen und erkennen lässt, während sie andererseits alle ihre objektiven Gestaltungen konkret und individuell vor uns hinstellt und sie damit mit dem stärksten und intensivsten Leben erfüllt." (p. 38). He thus talks about the function of expression ("Ausdrucksfunktion"), which is the only function of signal that "Mythos" possesses, and he claims that a radical separation of objective and subjective is impossible within the Mythos, which is not only psychological and sociological, but also symbological ("Symboltheoretisch"). On the principles of pure symbolic principles Cassirer wishes to make it possible to interpret and characterize certain mythological phenomena without having to trace them back to a concrete or pre-historical content. The mythological power and the experience of the holy is something different from the actual categories of thought and are as such essential to man and "I".

With the ownership signature of Samuel Skulsky, the famous Jewish philosopher of science and logic, on title-page.

Enst Cassirer was born in Breslau in Poland in 1874. He studied philosophy of law, germanistics, philosophy, science of history, and history of art at the University of Berlin, where he became Privatdozent in 1906. In 1919 he became Professor of Philosophy at the newly grounded University of Hamburg, but being a Jew he had to leave the country in the beginning of the thirties. After having been visiting professor in Oxford for a couple of years, he became visiting professor at the University of Götheborg in Sweden, where he four years later became a Swedish citizen. The following year (1940) he became Professor in Götheborg. He died in 1945.
The present work is published in Götheborg while he was visiting professor at Yale University.

Order-nr.: 33494