Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword to the English Edition
- Foreword to the First Edition
- Translator's Acknowledgments
- Translator's Note
- Translator's Introduction
- Introduction
- Part I Abstract Thinking versus Concrete Sensation: The Opposition between Culture and Nature in Modernity
- Chapter 1 Do Freedom and Indeterminacy Make Man a Cultural Being? Or, Why Antiquity Seems Antiquated
- Chapter 2 “Healthy Common Sense” and the Nature/Culture Antithesis
- Part II “Concrete Thought” as the Precondition of a Culture of Ethics, Politics, and Economics in Plato and Aristotle
- Conclusion: A Comparison of Two Fundamental Forms of European Rationality
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 1 - Do Freedom and Indeterminacy Make Man a Cultural Being? Or, Why Antiquity Seems Antiquated
from Part I - Abstract Thinking versus Concrete Sensation: The Opposition between Culture and Nature in Modernity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword to the English Edition
- Foreword to the First Edition
- Translator's Acknowledgments
- Translator's Note
- Translator's Introduction
- Introduction
- Part I Abstract Thinking versus Concrete Sensation: The Opposition between Culture and Nature in Modernity
- Chapter 1 Do Freedom and Indeterminacy Make Man a Cultural Being? Or, Why Antiquity Seems Antiquated
- Chapter 2 “Healthy Common Sense” and the Nature/Culture Antithesis
- Part II “Concrete Thought” as the Precondition of a Culture of Ethics, Politics, and Economics in Plato and Aristotle
- Conclusion: A Comparison of Two Fundamental Forms of European Rationality
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Opposition between Self-Created Culture and Pre-Determined Nature in Man
In Vico
Contemporary cultural studies, from whose concepts the traditional humanities have increasingly distanced themselves, understand themselves as an anthropological expansion of the humanities, which have until now been more philologically oriented, in two respects: the gap between the natural sciences and the humanities should be bridged through returning to their common basis, and Cartesian modernity's “logocentric concepts of identity,” its formal abstractness and its technical will to power should be restrained through a return to sensual, empathic, and “holistic” forms of human experience. This latter aim has been the motivation behind the rediscovery of earlier forms of holistic and corporeal thinking. Consequently, contemporary cultural studies mainly focus on Giambattista Vico (for his distancing from Descartes's rationalism), Johann Gottfried von Herder (for his elevation of the sense of touch to a prereflective, holistic form of experience), and Ernst Cassirer (for his systematic reconstruction of the development of human culture out of an analysis that includes all of man's capacities). Indeed, they see themselves as the culmination of the thought of these three thinkers.
If one traces this tradition down to the present, one sees that it really does make a beginning at overcoming the gap between “the two cultures.” Yet, surprisingly enough, the supposed opposition between Cartesian rationality and a “synesthetic,” corporeal and emotive form of experience proves to be an illusionary construction that, in reality, only corresponds to a difference in accentuation of a common, all-encompassing foundation.
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- Information
- Modernity and PlatoTwo Paradigms of Rationality, pp. 75 - 115Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2012