georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

128 Confronting ImagesThe Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: to propose a doctrine that ‘‘will accomplishfor the totality of cultural forms what the transcendentalcritique has done for pure cognition,’’ 120 which, according to Casssirer,would be a way of completing—of leading to its dreamt-of ends—philosophical idealism:Thus the critique of reason becomes the critique of culture.It seeks to understand and to show how every content ofculture, insofar as it is more than a mere isolated content,insofar as it is grounded in a universal principle of form, presupposesan original act of the human spirit. Herein the basicthesis of idealism finds its true and complete confirmation. 121In this way, the critique of culture would be able to follow term-fortermthe methodological development previously followed by Kantin the domain of pure knowledge. First, all ‘‘naive-realistic’’ viewswould be beaten in the breach, and a ‘‘general concept of the world’’would disappear in favor of a ‘‘culture’’ wherein the mind gives itselfits own world—which again brings us back to Panofsky’s beautifulformulation that the ‘‘relation of the eye to the world’’ is in fact the‘‘relation of the soul to the world of the eye.’’ 122 But from here onout synthetic questions, definitive questions will be posed: Cassirerproposes to consider ‘‘symbols’’ of quite different kinds—those usedby language, myth, art, and knowledge in general—otherwise than as‘‘merely’’ existing ‘‘side by side.’’ All symbols, he says, proceed from‘‘the same basic human function,’’ one in which each of them can findits formal reason, its universal and ‘‘fundamental proposition.’’ 123 Theculmination of idealism, then: every sensible sign, however ‘‘unique’’and particular it might be, should be able to find its place in theintelligibility and universality of a faculty or function of the humanmind.I must again insist on the double aspect of this grand hypothesis.On the one side, Cassirer promised a functionalist understanding ofthe symbol in general, and thus of linguistic, mythic, and artistic phenomenaconsidered as process. This was to take a great step forward,this was to dodge the traditional metaphysical givens ‘‘at the core of