Myron Jackson

It is puzzling that Alain Locke and Ernst Cassirer’s philosophies of culture have been little explored. It is my contention that Locke and Cassirer posit a functional logic of value (among other ideas). Both establish the importance of functionality for developing a pluralist understanding of cultural value while also critiquing a lack of social belonging and retreat into mythic consciousness. First, I will present an overview of Locke and Cassirer’s functional logic of value, speculating that the two met at the University of Berlin. Perhaps together they embraced freeing value from validity and vice versa, in the manner that Locke eloquently put it: Neither is the valuable necessarily valid, nor is the valid necessarily valuable. Although we have no evidence of such an encounter, it is difficult to believe that the two did not cross paths. Next, I will explore how both develop pluralist philosophies of culture. Notably, how race consciousness and kinship feelings-judgments add to our understanding and formation of the symbolic forms. In the final section, I will apply Locke and Cassirer’s functional axiologies to address what I call the darker political myths within the United States’ cultural context. Locke and Cassirer’s philosophies of functional value work to resist attempts to make one’s values into absolute or hegemonic ones. Overcoming closed and authoritative forms of mythic consciousness is a worthy endeavor given their current seductiveness and propensity to destroy rather than create cultural values.

Western societies currently face the backlash of violent and militant extremisms practiced in the form of tribalistic-phobocratic politics. The battleground is set between advocates of self-centeredness and those who entertain a world-centered self. To entertain concerns what Henri Bergson calls “zones of indetermination” and assumes A. N. Whitehead’s dictum: “in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true. The importance of truth is, that it adds to interest”. Cultural agencies, processes, and aims that we take an “interest” in have the power to be more influential, encouraging norms of persuasion. Such openness to the persuasion of entertainment is propositional in character, or acts as “lures for feeling” of proposals to be felt without mandates. The first section will discuss the way in which to take up the daunting task of reading Whitehead. The second and third sections will address those aspects pertinent to a philosophy of entertainment that present the cultural-aesthetic underpinnings for the emergence of persuasive agencies. The goal of cultivating tolerance and freedom for civilized societies hinges upon institutional methods and practices that are legitimated more by way of persuasive coercion rather than coercive persuasion.

One of the most intriguing and underappreciated aspects of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy is his treatment of peace as a civilizational aim of culture. The problem of peace is the subject in the final chapter of Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas. It is considered along with the other four qualities of civilized societies, “Adventure, Art, Beauty, and Truth.” Although his analysis is driven by examples from Western and Christian history, respectively, the treatment of peace developed is not limited to this or any specific experiential epoch. Peace is a transcultural value, the “harmony of harmonies,” which lies at the heart or in the “nature of things.” Whitehead designates the permanence-flux contrast of peace in human life as a tension between the “dream of youth” and “harvest of tragedy.” Our lives give way to the dance of the possible and actual that both unites and divides us. This article explains how Whitehead attempts to argue for peace by way of “balanced intensity” in response to the triumphs and tribulations of life. Section one deals with the ways in which youth and eros symbolize possibility and orient us toward the possible. Tragedy, or the determination of the individual in its own subjective realization and the consequent nature it produces through the “unity of adventure,” is the focus of the second section. In section three, the erotic-tragic contrast is presented in relation to peace as an “intuition of permanence.” In conclusion, Whitehead’s humanism will be offered as a viable alternative against the modern belief of progress or the quest for worldly success, in which prosperity becomes antithetical to the achievement of peace given its propensity to evade or outrun tragedy