Abstract

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.