Against the backdrop of the active postulation of a posthuman perspective by theorists of transhumanism and posthumanism, blurring the boundaries between the human and the non-human worlds and simplifying philosophical reflections on the inner world of man, the anthropological ideas of Ernst Cassirer are attracting particular interest. The purpose of this study is to highlight the distinctive features of the functionalsymbolic explanation of the essence of man in Cassirer’s philosophy and explore the relevance of his philosophical and anthropological views in the context of transhumanism and posthumanism. Considering humans from the point of view of their spiritual activity, Cassirer defines man as a symbolic being due to the fact that he has a unique ability to attach symbolic meaning to his surroundings. Cassirer replaces Kant’s forms of intuition and categories of reason with symbol. According to Cassirer, the symbolic nature of consciousness creates a special human existence, dominated not by physical but by spiritual laws determining a special inner world of man, which is a distinctive anthropological characteristic. It is precisely this characteristic that the theorists of posthumanism ignore when they postulate the idea of hybridization, placing man on par with non-human creatures and even technologies. The same problem is typical of transhumanism, which overcomes the boundary between human and technology. Cassirer argues that due to the unique symbolic nature of consciousness, man lives in a symbolic universe. This means that the human world cannot be entangled with the non-human world, as theorists of posthumanism hypothesize. Cassirer’s conceptualization of man who perceives reality through symbols undermines the posthumanist ideas of radical ontological openness and hybridization as well as the transhumanist postulate, according to which technology provides the means for unbound modification of human nature with the aim of achieving a transhuman phase as a transitional stage towards posthumanity. Cassirer’s ideas reintroduce the question of the inner man into anthropological discourse.
Ellen Martin (Fri,) studied this question.