Prof. Dr. Erol Göka
[Consciousness is neither a prerequisite for, nor the same thing as, the capacity for thinking and reasoning. An animal can solve many problems without being clearly conscious of what it is doing and why it is doing it. Admittedly, conscious thinking elevates thought to a new level, but this is not the same as thinking itself… Emotional feelings arise when we become consciously aware that an emotional system in the brain has become active. Every organism that possesses consciousness also has feelings. However, in a brain capable of classifying the world linguistically and categorizing experiences with words, feelings will differ from those in a brain incapable of doing so. The distinction between fear, anxiety, dread, worry, and the like would not be possible without language. At the same time, none of these words would have any meaning if there were not an underlying emotional system that produces the brain states and bodily expressions to which these words apply. Emotions evolved not as linguistically differentiated or otherwise consciously recognized feelings, but as brain states and bodily responses. Brain states and bodily responses are the fundamental realities of an emotion, and conscious feelings are mere decorations that add icing to the emotional cake.] (Joseph LeDoux. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. Simon and Schuster, 1996, p. 302.)
[It would be interesting to grasp the specificity of “being human” as lodged in this gap between cognitive and emotional capacities: a human being whose emotions fail to keep pace with his cognitive abilities would no longer be human—he would be a cold monster stripped of human feeling. Here we should supplement LeDoux with a more structural approach: it is not simply that our emotions remain stuck at a primitive animal level, lagging behind our cognitive capacities. This gap itself functions as an “emotional” reality in its own right, giving rise to new, specifically human emotions—ranging from anxiety (as opposed to mere fear) to (human) love and melancholy… There is a gap between emotions as biological-organic causal gestures and emotions as learned symbolic gestures that follow rules (such as Pascal kneeling in prayer). Specifically “human” emotions (such as anxiety) emerge only when a human animal loses its emotional anchoring in biological instincts, and this loss is supplemented by emotions that are symbolically regulated as the human being’s “second nature.”] (Slavoj Žižek. The Parallax View. MIT Press, 2006, pp. 226–227.)
All knowledge and reflections concerning the human being—concerning the characteristics that distinguish humans from other living creatures—bring us, again and again, back to the human being’s linguisticity and capacity for symbolization. We can reach all the other defining and distinguishing qualities of the human being most easily and directly through the channel of linguisticity. One may speak of selfhood, consciousness, and will in all living beings; yet what distinguishes the human being’s selfhood, consciousness, and will is precisely this linguistic quality—this capacity to produce symbols. In our view, it is the human being’s linguisticity that transforms the human mind into a substance entirely different from the material realm and enables it to construct a “world” fundamentally different from that of other living beings. For this reason, we have placed at the beginning of our article quotations from contemporary neuroscience and philosophy asserting that the “incisive interventions of language” are what differentiate the human being from other living creatures. According to the dominant understanding in contemporary neuroscience, “The Freudian conception of a brain alien to symbolic activity—a purely material substrate lacking autonomy in the management of its own energetic drives—is today in the process of complete dissolution.” (A. Johnston, C. Malabou. Self and Emotional Life. Trans. H. Gürvit. Axis Publications, 2025, p. 347.) When it comes to symbolism—that is, to linguisticity—the explanatory power of the vital substratum that unites humans and animals comes to an end, and an entirely new and altogether different story about the human being begins.
We are of the view that although the human mind appears to be very closely related to the material world, the body, and the brain—inseparably bound up with them and even seemingly derived from them—it can never be reduced to a material structure, and for this reason it constitutes a completely distinct substance. We believe that otherwise it would not be possible to provide an exhaustive account of selfhood, consciousness, and will (and, in this context, spirituality and belief, as well as theological questions). We are likewise convinced that the human being’s linguistic capacity for achieving symbolism is grounded in this mental substance. At this point we stand closer to Descartes’ perspective, and thus we belong to a line of thought that advocates beginning with Descartes. Yet when the matter turns to human linguisticity and to the transformative effects of symbolic language on the body and its culture-constituting properties in the material world, Descartes’ explanatory power proves insufficient today; therefore we must depart from that position and turn toward another path. In our view, the guidance of Ernst Cassirer on this question is highly reliable. I believe that through his philosophy of the human being, once the importance of linguisticity is better understood, we will also gain the opportunity to look at Descartes from an entirely new horizon.
Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of the Human Being
The question of what we can know has occupied human beings no less than the question of how our knowledge is formed. The problem of the “limits of scientific knowledge,” which is still fiercely debated today, is the result of such an important preoccupation. The problem of the limits of scientific knowledge in the modern sense was first formulated by Immanuel Kant.
Kant maintained that only the visible, that is, the “phenomenal” world, could be the subject of scientific knowledge and that only knowledge belonging to this world could be accepted as valid or true; he argued that the world he called the “noumenal”—the world “beyond phenomena”—could not be grasped through scientific knowledge. German idealist thinkers, most notably Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, challenged Kant and asserted that the “noumenal” world could also be understood, striving to demonstrate this. The fertile intellectual life of Germany did not delay in producing a reaction against the idealists under the name of “Neo-Kantianism.” The Neo-Kantians persistently argued that religious and metaphysical knowledge, which goes beyond the limits of science, possesses only practical value and is of no use in grasping reality.
The thinkers who gathered around Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp in the Marburg School sought to find a middle way in this irreconcilable conflict between the idealists and the Neo-Kantians. The thinkers of the Marburg School—among whom was Ernst Cassirer, one of the leading figures of twentieth-century thought for his contributions to the philosophy of the human being and culture—maintained that the factuality of the laws of thought constituted the “primary and uniquely knowable factuality,” thus remaining faithful to Kantian principles in this sense, yet they also defended a concept of “cultural consciousness” that aimed to unite science, morality, and art. The representatives of this school were Kantian insofar as they distrusted concepts such as “sensation” and “intuition,” which they regarded as irrational, and argued that every form of being could be reduced to a logical web of relations; however, through the emphasis they placed on culture, they clearly foregrounded the social dimension over the individualism characteristic of Kant.
Beginning with his 1910 work Substance and Function, Cassirer gradually began to transcend the limits of the natural-scientific and mathematical conception of knowledge characteristic of the Marburg School to which he belonged. Over time he attributed a different meaning to “culture” and developed his own distinctive understanding, one that approached the problem of knowledge from the perspective of cultural activity. In Cassirer’s philosophy—advancing ideas across many domains, from language to the state, from myth to religion, and from art to science and technology through both systematic and historical approaches—the concepts of “human” and “culture” always remained the central themes [1]. For Cassirer, the highest aim of philosophy is to find an answer to the question “What is the human being?”, and the answers given to this question have changed throughout the history of thought.
Now, in order both to observe the historical transformation in the view of the human being [2] and to gain familiarity with Cassirer’s thought, let us briefly examine how he interpreted the view of the human being throughout history and how he legitimized his own philosophy.
In the earliest stages of Greek philosophy, among the thinkers known as the “pre-Socratics,” we see that attention was directed solely toward the physical universe and that cosmology held a clear superiority over other philosophical inquiries. Among them, Heraclitus was the first philosopher to pose anthropological questions alongside cosmological ones and to suggest that one cannot understand nature without first understanding oneself. Socrates, on the other hand, represents the exact turning point in philosophical thought from outward orientation to inward orientation. In Socrates, all the questions of Greek natural philosophy and metaphysics disappeared, leaving only the question “What is the human being?” Yet Socrates did not offer a direct definition of the human being; he added the dimension of dialogue with others to the dimension of “self-understanding” and argued that, in order to understand the human being, one must grasp the contextuality of the “relations” that human beings themselves maintain. For Socrates—who declared that “an unexamined, uncriticized life is not worth living”—the human being became a “responsible” being and a moral subject through the capacity to respond to oneself and to others.
We can observe such a development in all forms of human cultural life. At the beginning, human beings are entirely dependent on their physical environment for their needs; they cannot survive unless they constantly adapt themselves to their surroundings. Accordingly, their first steps toward a world of thought and culture must reflect efforts to adapt to their immediate environment. Yet over time, in parallel with cultural development and diversification, human curiosity began to change direction. Alongside cosmology, anthropological forms of explanation—however rudimentary at first—began to appear, and gradually the principle “know thyself” acquired a determining significance in shaping the higher forms of moral and religious life.
In the intellectual life following Socrates, the question “What is the human being?” continued to retain its status as the fundamental question. The need for self-questioning present in Socrates became somewhat more complex among the Stoic philosophers, acquiring not only a moral but also a universal and metaphysical background. Unlike their predecessors, these philosophers began to draw a clear distinction between the natural and the spiritual aspects of the human being and emphasized that the human being is morally independent of nature. The absolute independence regarded in Stoicism as the fundamental virtue of the human being was transformed in Christianity into his fundamental deficiency and error. The Stoic moral injunction declaring that human beings should follow and respect their own inner “God” is not only ineffective but also misleading and false. The human being cannot rely on himself or listen to himself; he must silence himself in order to hear a higher and truer voice.
With Copernicus’s new cosmology, a great transformation appeared in the question “What is the human being?” For what now emerged was the scientific psyche (soul) in the modern sense of the word: what was sought was a general understanding of the human being grounded in empirical observations and the general principles of logic. For this, the artificial barriers separating the human world from the rest of nature first had to be removed. Reactions to this new worldview were not long in coming: the fears of figures such as Pascal and the skepticism of thinkers like Montaigne soon appeared. Giordano Bruno, meanwhile, laid the foundations of modern metaphysics through the concept of infinity. In order to overcome the intellectual crisis initiated by Copernicus, the joint efforts of the metaphysicians and scientists of the seventeenth century were required. While Galileo argued that human beings had attained a level of knowledge comparable to “divine reason” in the field of mathematics, Descartes introduced the idea of universal doubt and the concept of the “scientific infinite.” Leibniz proposed the idea of mathematical operations through which the physical universe could be comprehended; according to him, the laws of nature were nothing other than particular cases of the general laws of reason. Spinoza, for his part, constructed a mathematical philosophy of ethics aimed at liberating human beings from error and prejudice. Viewed as a whole, in the seventeenth century the principal task of resolving the problem of the human being was assigned to mathematical reason.
With the rise of modernity, which gathered momentum with the Enlightenment—and particularly under the influence of evolutionary theory—the traditional anthropological understanding that sought to interpret the universe by placing the human being at its center gave way to a naturalistic view that attempted to explain the human being on the basis of the physical knowledge he had produced about the universe. Modern thinkers and scientists—and gradually humanity as a whole—came to believe collectively that human nature constitutes a unity, and without abandoning this belief in unity they began to propose different views only regarding what fundamental faculty ensures this unity. For example, Nietzsche sought to explain this fundamental faculty through the “will to power,” Marx through “economic power,” and Freud through the axis of “instincts.”
Yet in the end, this differentiation in approaches to knowledge—although it concerned what was actually a secondary issue—produced a great number of conceptions of the human being that lacked consistency among themselves and even worked against one another. Cassirer therefore modestly (!) defined the primary mission of his own philosophy of the human being as “bringing order to this chaos in modern knowledge.” If a correct answer could be given to the question “What is the human being?”, an important clue for eliminating this disorder would also be obtained [3].
According to Cassirer, by treating the human being as if he were merely one object among the objects of nature and by making him entirely subject to natural determination, the naturalistic view had imprisoned the human being in a mute universe and had ignored culture. What was required, however, was first and foremost to consider the human being within culture and in its contextuality, and to determine that the most decisive characteristic distinguishing the human being from the animal is not reason, as is commonly supposed, but that the human being is “a symbolizing being (a symbolic being).” For Cassirer, reason alone was not sufficient to grasp the forms of human cultural life, emotions, and affective states in all their richness and diversity.
[1] E. Göka, Transitions Between Psychiatry and the World of Thought, Ankara, 1996, Vadi Publishing, pp. 200–204.
[2] For a different and more dissenting version of this relationship between history and the view of the human being, see Michel Foucault’s Technologies of the Self. [M. Foucault, Ben’in Yapımı (trans. L. Kavas), Istanbul, 1992, Ara Publishing.]
[3] E. Cassirer, An Essay on Man (trans. Necla Arat), Istanbul, 1980, Remzi Bookstore, pp. 15–36.