Cassirer's Directional Unity: Beyond Classification in Concept Formation

We can readily see how this critique may well apply to the traditional theory of abstraction in which the particular experiences are judged to be identical within the class; dogs, for example, whatever their shape and size, are all dogs: here, the general class is assumed to be the rule by which we learn the identity of the particular examples. But this immediately prompts the question as to how the particulars have come to be seen as ‘examples’ prior to the existence of the general rule. We can only conclude that the act of classification is not the primary mode of concept formation and that there must be a kind of mental activity in which particular instances and general rule are somehow initially interconnected.

This implies that we must perceive these events initially, not, as it were, looking back from the supposed vantage-point of the established class, but from a perspective in which particular and general are so interrelated as to constitute a direction of travel in the course of learning. This can only occur if perception is informed by an idea; clearly not an idea brought fully and explicitly to mind, itself then an object for consciousness, but one that does its work tacitly as in the performance of a skill. Following here Polanyi’s (1967) work, we can envisage the idea as an active, tacit alertness that searches for difference within the unity of the task, a unity, not experienced initially as a well-defined structure, but one that emerges alongside the increasing competence of the learner in a joint differentiation of subject and object. Husserl (1900-1901) used the term “ideirende” (idealising) abstraction in reference to this process of discovering unity that transcends differences through working through its possible examples.

Cassirer (1961), in his The Logic of the Humanities stresses that Husserl’s notion points to a method of analysis totally distinct from the empirical accumulation of findings in the natural sciences; its transcendent unity is quite distinct from the classification of identical, concrete particulars in such sciences:

That the result of such an ideirende abstraction could ever be brought to coincide with any concrete case - this can neither be expected or demanded. And “subsumption" can never be taken here in the same sense in which we subsume a body given here and now, i.e., a piece of metal, under the concept “gold”, after finding that it fulfils all the conditions of gold known to us. When we characterise Leonardo da Vinci and Aretino, Marsiglio Ficino and Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Cesar Borgia as “men of the Renaissance", we do not mean to say that there is to be found in them a definite and inherently fixed distinguishing trait in which they all agree. We perceive them to be not only completely different, but even opposed. What we are asserting of them is that in spite of this opposition, perhaps just because of it, they stand to each other in a particular ideal connection: each in his own way is contributing to the making of what we call the “spirit" of the Renaissance or the civilisation of the Renaissance.

What we are trying to give expression to here is a unity of ‘direction’, not a unity of ‘actualisation’. The particular individuals ‘belong together’, not because they are alike or resemble one another, but because they are ‘cooperating in a common task’, which, in contrast to the Middle Ages, we perceive to be new and to be the distinctive “meaning" of the Renaissance. All genuine concepts of style in the humanities reduce, when analysed more precisely, to such conceptions of meaning. (Cassirer, 1961, pp. 139-140)

In his companion volume to The Logic of the Humanities, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, Cassirer (1964) demonstrates with his customary scholarship just how the idea of “a common task" developed in the transition from the Medieval to the Renaissance era. What is immediately clear is that the development of a new narrative occurred primarily from within the old. It was not a case of a sudden independent appearance of a view ‘opposing’ the dominant Christian tradition which defined the medieval, but one, remaining within the Christian faith, which sought alternative philosophical explanations for its support.

The medieval Christian tradition, portrayed gloriously by Dante, that demanded a submission of the individual to the enveloping and transcendent Whole of God, was judged to be conceptually inadequate, and, as the title of Cassirer’s work suggests, one of the central problems of the post-medieval was to redefine this relationship as a mutuality of individual and Whole, a connection between the two which guaranteed faith in a new understanding of their necessary relationship. This new understanding raised questions about freedom and necessity, subject and object, the ideal and the sensory, and the nature and role of self-consciousness, which together then typify the common task of the Renaissance, but which also lay down the form of an inheritance which is exploited in quite different ways in post-Renaissance thought.

But, of course, there is never a clear break between historical periods. Dante’s authorship may well be regarded both as the summit of the Medieval and the beginning of the Renaissance. For Dante, there occurs a unity of the divine and the secular when the human self aligns itself with the grace of God through an abandonment of the selfishness of desire, the paradox of the self-negation that creates the true self. Dante’s poetry is both secular and divine; a comedy in which insight into the divine teaches us how to live. His journey from Inferno, through Purgatorio, to Paradiso is one of enlightenment: the sense of self is no longer simply that of a subjective self: the enlightenment of the sacred has taken you out of yourself into the shared world of a universal, divine experience. We can henceforth talk of stages in life’s way guided by the divine.

This is why Auerbach (2007) calls Dante "a poet of the secular world”: the characters in his narrative have to make "real world” choices between selfless acts expressive of the divine, and those acts of selfishness which disable the sense of the divine. Your exact position in Hell is a function of the degree of its selfishness. The existence of this isomorphism of secular and sacred is the reason why Dante is as relevant today as he was in the fourteenth century. In the same vein, the figure of Beatrice refers to the earthly love of Dante’s life and also to the lady who Dante, as subject of the ‘Comedy’, meets at the beginning and at the end of his journey. This relationship follows Dante’s dictum that men should aspire to nobility and women to grace as the two correlated higher characteristics of the presence of the divine in the human: nobility as purpose, grace as blessing. Williams (1953) refers to this co-incidence as the beginning of Romantic Theology, the love of others and of Nature which retains its popularity to this day.

Petrarch’s work is also founded on this theology but is perhaps even more relevant to the modern condition in its portrayal of the storm and stress of what was later called the "Romantic Agony”. Writing in the immediate aftermath of Dante’s work, he has a longing for the steadfastness of Dante’s vision but is unable to find the sure ground for its experience. As Baranski and Cachey (2009) point out, on the one hand, he tries to force himself to love God and despise the world through constant meditation on death and mortality; and, on the other hand, there occurs a futile longing for grace which can rescue him from "accidia, the despair that arises precisely from the meditation on a subjective self that is rootless, unstable, and incapable of conversion” (p. 246). This dualism of self and world carries with it the other dualisms of reason and feeling, intellect and love, soul and body, ideal and reality. The subjective self has no mooring to hold it steady; it is condemned to be free in the kind of freedom which knows no limits.

The Petrarchan spirit represents a decisive break with medieval tradition, but it takes us far beyond the spirit of the Renaissance. In particular, the distinction between the trials of the subjective and the later “success” of the objective in science and technology eventually ushered in a distinctly modern perspective in which the former can enjoy its sentiments of wonder and tragic heroism and the latter its monopoly of truth - both "works in progress”. Indeed, lacking any framework or whole which offers an anchorage, a life lived only among differences, the very idea of a self is disputed. This fatal dualism of subject and object does not characterise the philosophy of the Renaissance, which retains and refines its ideas of the divine alongside its achievements in science and mathematics. Its underlying philosophy is neither subjective- Romantic nor anarchic post-modern. If there is one direction of growth that offers a kind of unity to this period, it is, I believe, that of understanding proportion, of finding in our thought the right measure, whether in philosophy, religion, aesthetics, mathematics and science, or, most important of all, in the consciousness of how we should live.