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History of Art, Reason 127Cassirer’s ‘‘answer’’ to the general problem of culture consistedfirst, as is well known, of appropriating the essential results of Kant’scritical project in the domain of knowledge. 115 The Critique of PureReason provided the theoretical means for a salutary renunciation,whereby science was required to throw overboard ‘‘its aspirations andits claims to an ‘immediate’ grasp and communication of reality.’’Which meant, in sum, that every ‘‘objectification’’ of knowledge hadnever been and would never be anything but a ‘‘mediation,’’ an act ofthe knowing mind. 116 As previously suggested, this lucid putting-intoperspectiveof acts of knowledge by no means precluded—on the contrary,it came to ground—the establishment of a synthesis, wherebyscience might pretend to the unity of its ‘‘own body,’’ so to speak.The multiplicity of mediations, methods, and objects of knowledge,while irreducible, ought not to nullify, as Cassirer says, the ‘‘fundamentalpostulate of unity.’’ 117 For this unity is right there, not rightbefore our eyes, exactly, but in our eyes—in ‘‘the world of the eye’’ ofwhich Panofsky spoke—which is to say, in the very operation throughwhich the whole game of mediation and objectification unfolds: inshort, in knowledge itself considered as a faculty, or, to use Cassirer’sterm, as a function. Here, then, is the great difference that separatedCassirer’s neo-Kantism from the answers of classical metaphysics:‘‘This postulate of a purely functional unity replaces the postulate ofa unity of substance and origin, which lay at the core of the ancientconcept of being.’’ 118So the unity of knowledge exists: it is nothing other than the unityof the knowing mind. Its limits are those of the ‘‘fundamental proposition’’toward which, according to Cassirer, all cognition strives, andwhich indeed consists in ‘‘articulating’’ a unique content into a multifarioussign, a universal content into a particular sign, an intelligiblecontent into a sensible sign 119 . . . We begin to understand how thewhole problematic of the symbol was able to come forth* in Cassirerlike a displacement—even an application—of the Kantian philosophyof knowledge toward the world of language, myth, or art. Such,moreover, is the project explicitly announced in the introduction to*éclore.