3 - The Sacred and the Genealogy of Thinking: Descent into the Aristotelian Underground

Summary

Abstract

The exodus of thinking from Aristotelianism, which with its logical primacy of the concept of substance and the subordination of relations had long dominated it, characterizes the epistemic situation at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The breakthrough of purely symbolic thinking in physics and mathematics operated the collapse of the traditional logical formation based on substance. It also prompted the reopening of the question of thinking, which marked the historical condition of possibility for the emergence of a genealogical perspective that was interested in the pre-Aristotelian origins of thinking not least of all because it hoped thereby to decipher the post-Aristotelian situation of thinking. To grasp the most remote origins of the forms of intuition, the having-become of the categories, the beginnings of practices of symbolizing and relating, the genesis of idealities, and the appearance of the function of classification, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists explored the “primitive” world of the sacred and of communication. In the primitive underground, they sought the extralogical grounds—the concealed institutional sources—of the essential forms of thinking. The chapter charts a number of such enterprises, in which an entire age descended into its primitive noological ancestry, focusing on the project of a prehistory of the categories and the elucidation of the preparatory pathways of reason on which the Durkheim school concentrated its efforts.

Keywords: prehistory of the categories; totemism; animism; history of the emergence of thinking; genealogy of relating; the sacred; Ernst Cassirer; Émile Durkheim; Marcel Mauss

The pre-Aristotelian situation of understanding

In 1910, Ernst Cassirer wrote an early masterpiece of discourse archeology: Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff: Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen der Erkenntniskritik (lit., The Concept of Substance and the Concept of Function: Studies on the Fundamental Questions of the Critique of Knowledge, translated as Substance and Function). It presented the crisis in thinking brought about by the emergence of a pure symbolism in such a way as to tempt readers to see the birth of an archeology of knowledge laid out in these pages as the most characteristic effect of the crisis itself.