PHILOSOPHY OF E. CASSIRER IN RESEARCH OF THE THING WORLD OF TRADITIONAL CULTURE

Historians and critics have been engaged with the question on the sense of the thing and its position in traditional culture for the last 30 years, using methods of the structural-semiotic approach. Thus, the accent in researches has been made on the position of the thing in culture, on the anthropological aspect and on grammar of the thing world. However, the ontological problem of the thing in traditional culture, its understanding as one of the world outlook categories of culture is still in question. As the validity of traditional culture is shown by means of symbols embodied in things, space, household and ritual actions, it seems expedient to use the philosophy of symbolical forms of E. Cassirer as methodology. E. Cassirer's concepts of the symbolical concept, the functional concept and the symbolical form allow revealing the essence of the thing, its ontological status by means of the semantic aspects realised in a symbol. The real world is a certain symbolical form, which is a result of spiritual creativity of people. Traditional culture tends to mythologise the new sensual data which leads to confusion of the image and the thing in its material aspect. Such properties as colour, form and other represent themselves here as parts of a uniform symbolical image. The thing exists within its frame. The formation of the thing in culture occurs according to the following structure: 1) perception of sensual data (at this stage the person accepts information from sense organs and combines these parts into a single whole - the thing); 2) formation of a symbolical image of the thing in a certain culture (the received information is compared to the available world outlook foundations and a symbol of the thing is created which will be used further in life); 3) creation of a functional image of the thing in culture (the thing is given a number of functions according to the cultural features). The thing cannot exist in culture unless it acquires a certain symbolical form, as then it does not possess the status and properties for the person. Traditional culture uses rituals and placing objects somewhere definite to introduce the thing into the cultural continuum. Thus, the thing finds spatial coordinates in household space and cult, because the sketchiness of cosmological representations, characteristic for traditional culture, is expressed in grammar of the real world surrounding the person. The thing acts as a certain keeper of senses of culture, which are transferred from generation to generation by means of the tradition of creation of certain types of things, the canon of use, which in due course becomes a more ritual component than a really necessary one.