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.