Aby Warburg’s anthropological project in the perspective of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms

Abstract

The present article attempts, from the standpoint of philosophical anthropology, a reconstructionof Aby Warburg's last project in which some of his followers were also involved. Legitimacy of such approach is warranted by the results of a close examination of certain works in the history of medicine produced by Warburg's successors. These writings show the same interest in finding a strict correspondence between micro- and macrocosm as Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, which suggests that the actual centrepiece of the project has to deal with anthropology, though not narrowly understood as, e.g. in Warburg's early study of the habits of Pueblo Indians, but rather in the widest sense of the term embracing the problem of the subject and its manifestations. To recreate this theoretical framework and the respective problems without transcending the limits Warburg set himself in his last project, the author recurs to the model of the subject of culture grounded in Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. This latter model, in its turn, in order to match Warburg's ideas needs a careful revision which is achieved with the help of Cassirer's doctrine of symbolic concept based on the principle of mathematical function, or relational structure. To understand the problem of unity within Cassirer's ontology, one has to follow the reform of logic he undertakes. Only this way can his system be confronted with that implicitly present in Warburg. As a result, it becomes clear that what both systems have in common is that in either case the subject can only be defined via certain mediating symbolic structures: symbolic form and symbolic image. It ensues that the subject only comes to be as an array of its own projections which, as regards their unity, are functionally conditioned. The main difference between Cassirer's theory and the doctrine underlying Warburg's reflections is that for the latter the most important constituent of an image is its affective nature, whereas the former maintains cognition to be the 'purest' form of symbolic activity.