Volume 47, 2018
Philosophy of Culture
Michael Schramm
Pages 179-183
Symbolic Formation and the Social Construction of Reality
A philosophy of culture without a social theory is insufficient. We have to acknowledge cultural-based respectively cultural-bound perception and relativity of social life go hand in hand. The surrounding world is not autonomous of the human being, but constructed or produced by human mind. But it is not the single human mind which constructs, creates or builds ‘world’ or ‘reality’. Everything man deals with can be seen as his ‘second nature’ or: ‘culture’ created by man. I want to prove my hypothesis by comparing Cassirer’s cultural philosophy with Berger/Luckmann’s sociology of knowledge. I am going to illustrate similarities between both: I show that the purpose of institutions established by the process of institutionalization Berger/Luckmann describe is not exclusively to legitimate or stabilize society’s current structure. Institutions have got a value of their own; in other words: as culture. Essential is the comparison of Cassirer’s concept of symbolic formation resp. mediacy of perception and his underlying theorem of symbolic pregnancy. On the level of the terminology I can prove evidence of great affinity. The social theory of Berger/Luckmann and their theory of institutions can be seen as missing parts of Cassirer’s cultural philosophy. I am able to demonstrate that the theory of Berger/Luckmann as cultural philosophy supplements Cassirer’s ‘Philosophy of Symbolic Forms’ with two crucial points: Berger/Luckmann supply a theory of sociality and add a ontogenetic perspective to the process of ‘culturalisation’.