An Attempt at a Critique of Early Modernity's Antithesis between Nature and Culture

Hopefully, this brief overview of some of the attempts at defining the cultural being “man” in terms of his indeterminacy will already have made the beginnings of such a critique plausible. Manifestly, it was a desire for a “scientificization,” that is, for a scientific rationalization and justification of the perspective of common sense, that was instrumental in the development of the classical philosophies of consciousness. This is so even today. This absolutization of a mode of thinking in conformity with the common sense view is the real root of all these problems in defining this new image of man. Yet, because these problems arise from nuanced and critical scientific and conceptual analyses and so stake claim to objective validity to a degree we would not have as easily granted to common sense alone, it seems as though these aporias arise from the nature of the subject itself. I therefore summarize the central tenets of this approach once more from both the common sense perspective and its reflected and theoretically developed form, so as to make clear that both entail commonplace and self-evident views and not some far-removed epistemological theses from a historical time (as though they did not concern our everyday lives or the world of practical action).