Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2001. First published in
Germany as Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck
© Suhrkamp Verlag 1997.
First published in 2001 by Polity Press
in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd
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ISBN 0–7456–2088–4
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Contents
Preface
1 The Liberating Power of Symbols
I
II
III
Notes
2 The Conflict of Beliefs
I
II
III
IV
V
Notes
3 Between Traditions
4 Tracing the Other of History in History
Notes
5 A Master Builder with Hermeneutic Tact
I
II
III
IV
Notes
6 Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?
Notes
7 Communicative Freedom and Negative Theology
I
II
III
IV
V
Notes
8 The Useful Mole who Ruins the Beautiful Lawn
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
Sources
Index
Preface
This volume brings together essays and speeches which were written for various occasions. But the themes I addressed as these different opportunities arose may be of more general interest.
In comparison with other philosophers of their generation, the works of Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers have not yet found the echo amongst younger thinkers which they deserve. In the first two chapters I investigate the underlying concerns which gave rise to their philosophies as a whole, with the aim of bringing out the contemporary relevance of their thought. By contrast, memories of the spontaneity of the great story-teller Gershom Scholem are still so vivid that only now are his writings beginning to emerge from the shadow of his unique personality. The central motif of his thinking is closely intertwined with the shimmering figure of the false prophet Sabbatai 
evi.
In the remaining essays, I engage with friends and colleagues. Here, too, my conversations are more with the work than with the individual. They can be read as fragments of a history of contemporary philosophy. Alexander Kluge, the great theorizer among writers and film-makers, will forgive me for including him with philosophers, and even theologians.
J.H.
Starnberg, March 1996
For John Michael Krois, to whose admonition I shall seek to respond
When the University of Hamburg was founded after the First World War, Aby Warburg was able to carry out the plan he had long cherished of making his private library accessible to the public. The library became the focal point of an institute for interdisciplinary research in the human and cultural sciences, where students and visitors were able to work, and where university seminars and public lectures were held. For a small circle of scholars concerned with the study of religion it became an ‘organon of humanistic research’, as Cassirer was later to put it. In fact, Ernst Cassirer was one of the first to give a lecture there. The following entry can be found in the annual report of the Warburg Library for 1921, written by Fritz Saxl:
Professors Cassirer, Reinhardt, Ritter, Wolff, Junker, and Dr. Panofsky, are now constant users and patrons of the Library. It has even transpired that Prof. Cassirer, in a lecture to the Hamburg Society for the Study of Religion (of which Prof. Warburg was a founder), has taken up ideas which were earlier quite foreign to him, but which he found himself developing as a result of his use of the Library. Prof. Cassirer intends to expand on these ideas in a major work.1
The first volume of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms did indeed appear two years later. However, the word of thanks to the Library that appears in the preface to the second volume, which is devoted to mythical thought, has a rather different emphasis:
The first drafts and other preliminary work for this volume were already far advanced when through my call to Hamburg I came into close contact with the Warburg Library. Here I found abundant and almost incomparable material in the field of mythology and general history of religion, and in its arrangement and selection, in the special intellectual stamp which Warburg gave it, it revolved around a unitary central problem related to the basic problem of my own work.2
At the beginning of that first lecture in the Library, Cassirer had already spoken in similar terms:
The questions with which I would like to deal… had already concerned me over a long period, but now it seemed as though they stood embodied before me. I had an overwhelming feeling that… this was not merely a collection of books, but a collection of problems. It was not the material of the Library which impressed me in this way; stronger than the impact of the material itself was that made by principles of its organization.3
The works which Warburg had collected belonged to many different disciplines, but, in Cassirer’s view, they were ‘connected to an ideal middle point’. Cassirer rightly emphasizes the independence of his own philosophical development. But the interest which Warburg and Cassirer shared in the symbolic medium of the human mind’s forms of expression was the basis of their intellectual affinity.
The books were divided into four sections; and users of the Library were evidently expected to regard the hidden principle of this organization as an invitation to decipher the theory which it implicitly embodied. Viewed in this way, the ordering of the Library encouraged readers to reflect on the theory of symbolization. Indeed, the description of the present state of the Library, which, since 1958, has been housed in Woburn Square in London in an arrangement modelled on the Hamburg original, reads as though inspired by Cassirer’s philosophy of the development of symbolic forms. The world of symbolic forms extends from pictorial representation, via verbal expression, to forms of orienting knowledge, which in turn pave the way for practice: ‘The library was to lead from the visual image, as the first stage in man’s awareness, to language and hence to religion, science and philosophy, all of them products of man’s search for orientation, which influence his patterns of behaviour and his actions, the subject matter of history.’4
Cassirer also had other reasons to feel at home in the Library. For it was quite astonishingly congenial to his interests and basic approach. (1) Cassirer could not help but be pleased by the role allotted to philosophy; (2) the collection articulated a notion of culture which interested Cassirer from the epistemological angle; (3) furthermore, Cassirer discovered here in all its breadth and variety the literature of the Renaissance, a literature on whose philosophical currents he had worked; (4) and finally, it was not hard for Cassirer to discern a vital motif of his own thinking in the nature of Warburg’s interest in the survival of antiquity in modernity.
(1) As Raymond Klibansky reports, the philosophical material in the Library is far from being structured so as to reflect the status of a First Science; rather, philosophy is treated as a discipline amongst others, or is assigned to other disciplines in a foundational role.5 So, for example, aesthetics is assigned to the history of art, ethics to jurisprudence, and the philosophy of nature to scientific cosmology. Cassirer could not help but recognize his own conception of philosophy and his own way of working here. The last twentieth-century individual possessed of a universal culture, the author of books on Kant, Goethe and Einstein, Cassirer had acquired expertise in logic and mathematics, the natural and human sciences, and the history of literature, art and religion. He knew that philosophy could only retain its influence through participation in the specialized knowledge of the individual disciplines and through co-operation with them on an equal footing. Cassirer wanted to learn from the sciences. His style was far from that of the transcendental philosopher in search of ultimate foundations, who imagines himself to be always one step ahead of all empirical knowledge. Cassirer mistrusted the imperious attitude of great philosophy, which imagines it has a universal key, despises mundane knowledge, and obstinately burrows into the depths from its narrow patch of ground. Far more than with Heidegger, he agreed with Hegel, who believed that the depths of spirit are only as deep as ‘its willingness to expand and immerse itself in intepretation’.6
(2) The Warburg Library also encouraged Cassirer’s interests in the sense that it represented the object domains which are especially challenging for an epistemology in the Kantian tradition. The Critique of Pure Reason was of course intended to explain how natural-scientific knowledge is possible. The historical sciences of culture only developed later, in the course of the nineteenth century. Cassirer realized that transcendental philosophy could not react to this ‘fact of the human sciences’ in the same way that Kant, in his time, reacted to the fact of Newtonian physics. From a transcendental standpoint, nature is constituted for us at the same time as the object domain of the natural sciences. But the human sciences are concerned with cultural structures, which they find already to hand as pre-scientifically constituted objects. The concept of culture itself can no longer be adequately explained in terms of the constitution of a corresponding domain of scientific objects. Rather, the human sciences are themselves cultural constructs, which they are able to turn back and reflect on self-referentially, for example, in the form of the history of science. For this reason Cassirer’s aim is not that of Dilthey, namely to expand the critique of ‘pure’ reason into a critique of ‘historical’ reason. A philosophy of culture is to take the place of a mere expansion of the scope of the theory of knowledge. Passing via the interpretive achievements of the cultural sciences, such a philosophy will reach out to grasp the practical ‘understanding of the world’, the ‘conception of the world’ and ‘forming of the world’ implicit in cultural practice itself, thereby throwing light on the symbolic generation of culture:
Logic finds itself confronted with entirely new problems, as soon as it tries to look beyond the pure forms of knowledge towards the totality of spiritual forms in which a conception of the world is articulated. Each of them – such as language and myth, religion and art – now reveals itself to be a distinctive organ for the understanding of the world, and also for the creation of ideal worlds, an organ which retains its peculiar rights alongside and over against theoretically elaborated scientific knowledge.7
(3) Right from the beginnings of his scholarly career, Cassirer had embedded epistemological questions in historically specific cultural contexts. Above all, starting with Nicholas of Cusa, he had followed the emergence of the modern conception of nature in the Renaissance. In 1906, in the preface to the first volume of The Problem of Knowledge in the Philosophy and Science of the Modern Age, he had declared that the new conception of natural-scientific knowledge had emerged from the confluence of ‘a variety of intellectual and cultural forces’; individual philosophical systems should always be related to the ‘currents and forces of general intellectual culture’.8 It was only twenty years later that this programme came to full fruition, when Cassirer approached more or less the same period and the same authors from a somewhat different angle, in order to develop the thesis that it was a new ethical self-conception and a new dynamic feeling for the world which were the decisive driving forces behind the new conception of nature embodied in modern physics: ‘Anyone unable to sense within himself the heroic feeling of self-assertion and of limitless self-expansion will remain blind to the cosmos and its infinity.’9 This enquiry into The Individual and the Cosmos in the Renaissance is dedicated to Aby Warburg on his sixtieth birthday. Here it becomes clear what Cassirer owed to his new environment: not so much the content of his theses as the nature and range of the historical material which supports them. For now the constellations begin to speak. Cassirer derives philosophical thoughts from allegories – changes in the philosophical concept of freedom, for example, from the transformations of the symbol of Fortuna: ‘Fortuna with the wheel which seizes hold of man and spins him around, sometimes raising him high, sometimes plunging him into the depths, becomes Fortuna with the sail – and it is no longer she alone who steers the ship, but rather man himself who (now) sits at the rudder.’10
(4) But above all, in the reflecting mirror of the assembled books, Cassirer encountered the lifelong concerns of the learned collector himself. Like many of his contemporaries, who had also been influenced by Nietzsche, Warburg was interested in the return of the archaic in modernity. He too was concerned with that constellation which proved such a stimulus for the avant-garde in painting and literature, psychology and philosophy – Picasso and Braque, Bataille and Leiris, Freud and Jung, Benjamin and Adorno. Like Benjamin’s ‘Arcades Project’, Warburg’s plan for an atlas which would trace the lines of collective memory remained unfulfilled. Under the keyword ‘Mnemosyne’ Warburg wanted to use an ingenious montage of pictorial material to illustrate the continuing heritage of expressive gestures passed down from antiquity. In these passionate gestures, tinged with something phobic and yet aesthetically restrained, he deciphered archaic impulses. The Renaissance interested him as the stage on which the drama of the re-awakening of pagan antiquity, an antiquity now purged of its demons, was played out.
The term ‘pagan world’ was Warburg’s shorthand for that exciting ambivalence of enthralment and emancipation, of chaotic anxiety and orgiastic abandon, which lived on in a sublimated form in the gestures of European enthusiasm: ‘More than ever therefore, the Renaissance appears in the Mnemosyne as a precious moment of precarious religious equilibrium in which the sources of heathen passions were tapped but still under control.’11 The force of artistic creation, purged of its demons, clearly had an existential significance for Warburg. The atlas project was to be introduced with the words: ‘The conscious creation of distance between oneself and the external world may be called the fundamental act of civilization. Where this gap conditions artistic creativity, this awareness of distance can achieve a lasting social function.’12
This idea has a striking resemblance to the fundamental insight on which Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms also draws. The idea also expresses a practical intention which Cassirer shares, and which he formulates in conceptual terms: the fact that sensory contact with the world is reworked into something meaningful through the use of symbols is the defining feature of human existence, and also constitutes, from a normative standpoint, the basic trait of a properly human mode of being. In other words, the objectifying force of symbolic mediation breaks the animal immediacy of a nature which impacts on the organism from within and without; it thereby creates that distance from the world which makes possible a thoughtful, reflectively controlled reaction to the world on the part of subjects who are able to say ‘no’.
Against a Lebensphilosophie bent on celebrating the spontaneity of non-alienated life, which at that time had taken on politically virulent forms, Cassirer emphasizes the broken character of our symbolic relation to the world, a relation which is mediated by words and tools. He also stresses the indirectness of a self-relation which forces human beings to make a detour via symbolically generated objectifications in order to return to themselves: ‘The world of spirit first emerges when the flow of life no longer simply streams onward… when life, instead… of consuming itself in the act of giving birth, gathers itself together into lasting forms and sets these up outside itself and before itself.’13 This taking of distance is not, of course, the ascetic activity of a spirit ‘hostile to life’ (Scheler), which, as ‘antagonist of the soul’ (Klages), irrupts from without into a ‘life blind to ideas’. Rather that intermediate domain of symbolic forms, which the human mind weaves around itself, and through which it interprets itself, arises from a process of ‘inner transformation and reversal which life experiences in itself’. This is the fundamental process of symbolization:
Language and art, myth and theoretical knowledge all contribute to… this process of mental distanciation: they are the major stages on the path which leads from the space of what can be grasped and effected, in which the animal lives and within which it remains confined, to the space of sensory experience and thought, to the horizon of mind.14
I would now like to show how Cassirer analyses this process of symbolization, which first makes human beings into human beings, as occurring in the field of tension between myth and enlightenment, and how he demonstrates its relevance for a semiotic reformulation of transcendental philosophy (II). We will find that the problems internal to this construction suggest a reading of The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms from the standpoint of a theory of civilization – a reading which first sets Cassirer’s humanistic inheritance in the correct light. I am not referring here to that obvious inheritance from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment which Cassirer made his own in many learned studies, but the humanistic legacy which his philosophy has bequeathed to us.
The most obvious result of the intellectual stimulus which Cassirer received during the twenties, if not from Warburg himself, then from the scholarly discussions of religion in the circle gathered around him in his library, can be found in his important reflections on mythical images and linguistic symbols. The original function of such images and symbols is said to be both the control of affects and the creation of meanings (1). These reflections throw a clearer light on the foundations of a philosophy of symbolic forms, which emerged out of an innovative reception of Humboldt’s philosophy of language (2). Even prior to his Hamburg period, Cassirer had employed the philosophy of language as the key to a semiotic reformulation of transcendental philosophy. This allowed him to give the theory of concepts and the problematic of the ‘thing-in-itself’ a convincing formulation (3).
(1) In 1925 there appeared a treatise on ‘Language and Myth’ in the series of studies published by Warburg Library, in which Cassirer (drawing primarily on H. Usener’s classic work on the formation of religious concepts)15 dealt with the problem of the names of the gods. Here he analyses the basic process of symbol formation more penetratingly than in the second volume of his masterwork, which had already appeared.16 Cassirer’s aim is to explain how, at the beginning of the process of anthropogenesis, language and myth apparently emerge simultaneously from ‘the same basic act of mental processing, of the concentration and intensification of simple sensory intuition’. Language and myth are ‘two diverse shoots from the same parent stem, the same impulse of symbolic formulation’,17 but, in the course of their differentiation into a world of images and a linguistic world, they go in opposite directions. Mythical images are a condensation of individual, meaning-laden impressions, which remain bound to their original context, whereas in the medium of language individual cases are generalized into exemplary cases or into an articulated whole.
Acts of symbolization are distinguished by the fact that they break open environments shaped by the peculiarities of a particular species. This they do by transforming fluctuating sense impressions into semantic meanings and fixing them in such a way that the human mind can reproduce the impressions in memory and preserve them. Thereby the temporal dimensions of past and future are also opened up to the human mind. Animal awareness of time stands under the dominance of the present:
the past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It is the symbolic expression which first creates the possibility of looking backward and looking forward.… What occurred in the past, now separated out from the totality of representations, no longer passes away, once the sounds of language have placed their seal upon it and given it a certain stamp.18
In creating meanings which remain self-identical, symbolization creates a medium for thoughts which can transcend the temporal stream of consciousness.
Symbolic form is thus originally generated by a stylizing force, which condenses the dramatic impact of experiences. Here Cassirer makes use of Usener’s theory of ‘momentary gods’ to account for symbolic condensation as a response to the exciting ambivalence of meaning-laden experiences. Think of a hill protecting someone from pursuit, the water which saves a person dying of thirst, a sudden noise or wild animal which pounces on the solitary individual – of any situation or object which both repels and allures, which both arouses horror and releases tension, which tears the soul back and forth between terror and attraction. Such compressed, highly significant experiences, which are the focus of an isolating attention, can congeal into a mythical image, can be semanticized and thereby spellbound, given fixity by a divine name which makes it possible to recall and control them. Through the symbolic transformation of sense experience into meaning, affective tension is both discharged and stabilized. Cassirer speaks of an almost violent separation and isolation of the strong impression: ‘only when this splitting off succeeds, when intuition is compressed into a single point and apparently reduced to it, does a mythical or linguistic structure result, only then can the word or the momentary god emerge.’19 Of course, not just any objective content of intuition can be condensed into the meaning of a symbol, but only those contents of experience which are affectively relevant for a being which can hope and suffer, which has interests and concerns. This explains the ‘passionate’ character which Warburg discovered in primordial expressive gestures.
Yet if the process of symbolization amounted to no more than the spell-binding and condensing power to objectify individual, meaning-laden experiences in mythical form, then the subject would remain caught in a world of images. The dialectical character of symbolization consists in the fact that it also points in the opposite direction, towards an exemplary generalization and comprehensive ordering of the fixed expressions within an articulated whole:
As soon as the spark has leapt across, as soon as the tension and the affect of the moment have been discharged in a word or in a mythical image, then a reversal can start to occur with the mind.… Now a process of objectification can begin which advances ever further. As the activity of human beings extends over an ever wider area, so a progressive subdivision and ever more precise articulation of both the mythical and the linguistic world is achieved.20
The spell-binding tendency that congeals intense experiences in specific forms is counteracted by the conceptualizing tendency, which points towards generalization and specification.
Although language and myth have a common root in the stratum of metaphorical expression, they are differentiated from each other along the axes of the production of a plenitude of meaning conveyed by images, on the one hand, and the logical disclosure of a categorially articulated world, on the other. Language, which becomes the vehicle of thought, conceals a logical power and ‘free ideality’ which are alien to myth. The mythical image stands in for the ‘obscure plenitude of being’ which only propositional discourse can release, by giving it a ‘linguistically accessible articulation’. Myth and