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History of Art, Reason 131meaning’’; in the American version, he shows us, after the ‘‘naturalsubject matter,’’ the ‘‘conventional subject matter,’’ and finally the‘‘ ‘symbolical’ content’’—we might risk the hypothesis that this table,meant to set forth the categories usable by the historian of art, didnothing, in sum, but adhere spontaneously to Kant’s schema of syntheticunity expounded in the Critique of Pure Reason.Let’s recall the three great moments of this famous text, which setsout to do nothing less than reveal the very conditions of ‘‘a prioriknowledge of all objects’’: first comes the ‘‘manifold of pure intuition,’’a matter of events in the world as these brusquely presentthemselves to us, in accordance with the most elementary ‘‘conditionsof the receptivity of our mind, under which alone it can receive representationsof objects.’’ 133 It would be easy to imagine Kant citing herethe example of a man removing his hat: recognizing this simple eventas effectively being premised on space, time, and still other ‘‘conditionsof receptivity.’’ We are on the level of Panofsky’s ‘‘primary subjectmatter,’’ we are on the level of the sensible manifold: it will giveplace to a cognition only after having been ‘‘gone through’’ (durchgegangen)—andsynthesized. Second moment, then: it falls to the imaginationto begin the going-through. ‘‘Blind though indispensable,’’ writesKant, the imagination ‘‘collects the elements for cognitions and unifiesthem into a certain content’’: an action that is called a synthesis, in themost general sense of the term. 134 The third moment will provide asynthetic unity, what I referred to earlier as an ‘‘over-synthesis’’: whichhenceforth rests on the pure understanding, and thus definitivelygrounds the act of cognition. 135 Panofsky’s ‘‘essential meaning’’ is thusattained: it is a concept.As goes the knowledge of art, so goes all knowledge: it will proceedfrom intuition to image, and above all from image to concept. I say‘‘above all’’ because it is the second translation that is the crucial moment,the one that, as in Kant, would justify the considerable prestigeof the grand word knowledge. But the ‘‘science of art,’’ Kunstwissenschaft,would not make only this one requirement concerning itsform. One more time, it required of its object a symmetrical form,such that the ‘‘circle’’—methodical or vicious—could suitably loop theobject to the subject. Here we are moving toward an utterly radical