Culture as Logical Space of Reasons: Cassirer, Simmel, and Sellars, and the Problem of Reason in Culture

Culture as Logical Space of Reasons: Cassirer, Simmel, and Sellars, and the Problem of Reason in Culture

Gabriel Ferreira

Sometimes, we overlook the fact that philosophical problems not only possess their own histories but also 'emerge.' Just as History underwent a transformation, Culture, as a distinct philosophical problem, emerged in the 19th century. Cassirer aptly states, "the philosophy of culture is the youngest philosophical discipline" (CASSIRER, 1939). By making this assertion, I am not suggesting that philosophers lacked interest in historical or cultural issues before. Instead, I argue that history and culture acquired a different philosophical significance after Hegel's philosophy of history. Culture particularly gained special philosophical interest during the latter half of the 19th century. While philosophers like Kant, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schiller, and Herder contemplated concepts such as 'Bildung,' 'Kultur,' 'Formation,' and 'inward form' (not to mention terms like "Zivilisierung" and the like) before the 19th century, what the 'philosophy of culture' evolved into under the influence of Marburg and Baden Neokantians differed significantly from the thoughts of these predecessors. For philosophers at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, "Culture" became a distinct philosophical object for two main reasons—firstly, the progress of the Naturwissenschaften prompted a reconfiguration of the edifice of human knowledge and production, and secondly, there arose a need to contemplate the moral and social consequences of this reordering. Therefore, in this presentation, I will extract essential insights from Cassirer and Simmel regarding the "fact of culture" and its contemporary epistemological and moral crisis. I will also attempt to address it by building upon a Sellarsian pragmatic conception of culture as a Logical Space of Reasons.