Transcript
Penultimate version. Please, refer to the srcinal in print! DOI: 10.1086/690581 1 Mario Wimmer, “The Afterlives of Scholarship: Warburg and Cassirer,” History of Humanities 2, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 245-270. The Afterlives of Scholarship: Warburg and Cassirer Mario Wimmer “To the Guide on the pathway to intellectual orientation, Prof. A. Warburg, in grateful admiration” —Ernst Cassirer 1 Abstract One of the unresolved riddles in the history of the humanities is the relationship between Aby Warburg and Ernst Cassirer, or, more precisely, the impact of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg on Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In engaging with this particular constellation I lay out a model of what I call epistemic surroundings and how they facilitate scholarly production in the humanities. Therefore, this article sets out to describe the labor of humanists in terms of an historical epistemology. In short, this is an essay in understanding humanist scholarship in the making and its afterlives as plastic knowledge in inevitable motion. In 1919, Ernst Cassirer accepted a position in the philosophy department of the newly established University of Hamburg. The city of Hamburg at that time has been described as a “Dreamland of Humanists,” 2 not the least because of Warburg’s library. Only a couple of months later, Cassirer started working there. This eccentric collection of books was driven by a “superior empiricism” 3 to understand the afterlives of the humanistic, if not human, tradition. It assembled books and objects from all fields and disciplines across the history of the humanities and was devoted to the study of the “afterlife of antiquity in European thought.” 4 Warburg’s understanding of the humanistic tradition went beyond nostalgic affirmation in addressing a particular problem: the afterlife of ! 1 Warburg Institute Archive (WIA), Ernst Cassirer’s handwritten dedication in Aby Warburg’s copy of Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms; author’s translation . 2 Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013). 3 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Warburg’s Haunted House,” Common Knowledge, 18 (2010) 1, 50-78. 4 WIA I.9.15.1, draft of a flyer for the K.B.W.: “Nachlebens der Antike für die europäischen Geistesverfassung,” author’s translation; see also Anthony Grafton and Geoffrey Hamburger, “Introduction,” Common Knowledge, 18 (2010) 1, 1-16, 1. Penultimate version. Please, refer to the srcinal in print! DOI: 10.1086/690581 2 survivals of the past in the present. 5 Warburg was interested in “cultural exchange” of a material tradition across continents and periods as “function of social memory.” 6 Along these lines the afterlife of antiquity involved not only historical and psychological issues but also an ethical question: Could antiquity provide a model for a good life today? 7 Art historian Martin Warnke has argued that in Warburg’s universe of thought antiquity thus figures as an absolute metaphor 8 for a peculiar “energy that enables the human being to escape misery and delusion.” 9 Furthermore, Warburg’s goal was to establish a novel method of cultural inquiry that tried to understand the intimate relations between rational and pre-logical or irrational—in short, mythical—discourse. As a result, books in his collection were not arranged following a traditional system of classification; rather, books from all humanistic disciplines were set up following the “law of the good neighbor” 10 —each book was supposed to provoke and enter into a conversation with the one next to it on the shelf. Although this phrase was the guiding motto for the library’s operation, it never appears in Warburg’s writings. Warburg once called the organizing principle the “blessing of the good neighbor” 11 but really thought of it more as “conjunctive thinking” 12 that is to say a way of thinking along symbolic-material associations and interconnections. His thinking was driven by what he in another context had called Verknüpfungzwang 13 , an almost paranoid desire of making connections. Thus it does not come as a surprise that Warburg thought of himself as a “seismograph of spirit” at the “weather divide of culture.” 14 It was Ernst Gombrich who first suggested that Warburg’s work on the library collection was his true intellectual achievement. To this day the best account of the history of the 5 In his notebooks Warburg occasionally spoke of “survival value,” e.g. WIA, III 133.1. note-book (binder) “Zwischen den Erbmassen,” fol. 2. 6 WIA I.9.9 (1-3) Warburg, July 4, 1927 On a planned American visit, vol 1, fol 2. 7 WIA, I.1, fol. 3. 8 Following Hans Blumberg’s use of the term. 9 Martin Warnke, “Die Bibliothek Warburg und ihr Forschungsprogramm,” Porträt aus Büchern: Bibliothek Warburg und Warburg Institute. Hamburg 1933 London, ed. Michael Diers (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz Verlag, 1993) , 29-34, 32. 10 See Michael P. Steinberg, “The Law of the Good Neighbor,” Common Knowledge 18 (2012) 1, 128-133. 11 I want to thank Claudia Wedepohl for information on this point. “Beyond the oral tradition reported by Gombrich and Saxl (which is certainly reliable) I know of only one document whose author is Aby Warburg and which mentions the fact that one book leads to the next and the ‘Segen des guten Nachbarn.’” WIA, GC, Aby Warburg to Carl Albert Gempf, Sept 24, 1929. 12 In the srcinal German “verknüpfendes Denken,” see WIA Family correspondence, letter from Aby Warburg to his brother Max M. Warburg, June 13, 1928. 13 Aby Warburg, “Heidnisch-antike Weissagung in Wort und Bild zu Luthers Zeiten,” Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philosophisch-Historische Klasse , 26 (1919), (Heidelberg: Winter, 1920). 14 WIA I.9.9 (1-3), Warburg July 4, 1927, on a planned American visit, vol. 1, fol. 2. Penultimate version. Please, refer to the srcinal in print! DOI: 10.1086/690581 3 Warburg library remains that by Salvatore Settis 15 , though recent interest in the institutional and intellectual history of the library has added important aspects. 16 However, in the following I am specifically interested in the encounter between Warburg and Cassirer as well as in the role Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek (K.B.W.) played for the philosopher of symbolic forms. 17 When the first volume of Cassirer’s magnum opus was published, the annual report of the library mentions proudly that “the work of professor Cassirer was done with the continuing aid of our holdings.” 18 In response Cassirer did not hesitate from confirming the obvious in the introduction to the second volume of his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms : “The first drafts and other preliminary work for this volume were already far advanced when through my calling to Hamburg I came into close contact with the Warburg Library. Here I found abundant and almost incomparable material … its arrangement and selection, in the special stamp which Warburg gave it, revolved around a unitary, central problem closely related to the basic problem of my own work.” 19 For Cassirer and others the Warburg library was an intellectual commons for working and thinking about various problems in the humanities. It embodied a particular notion of the humanities: an ensemble of symbols, images and signs and their relation to each other. They did not belong to the cultures from which they emerged but were floating in the currents of time. Both Cassirer’s and Warburg’s understanding of cultural inquiry went beyond disciplinary boundaries and called for a “nameless science” 20 that looked at a range of intellectual problems in their specific contexts. It was, in a way, not only a “nameless science” but also a “pathological discipline” that gave access to symbolic forms as symptoms of a culture and the analysis of its pathos . 21 The paradigmatic cases were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, as they were considered emblematic of antiquity’s persistence and reiteration, while they, at the same time, opened a future trajectory of “liberation from the mystification of 15 Salvatore Settis, “Warburg continuatus. Descrizione di una biblioteca,” Quaderni Storici , 20 (1985) 58, 3-38. 16 In particular the contributions to a special issue of Common Knowledge ed. by Anthony Grafton and Geoffrey Hamburger in 2012 as well as Diers, ed., Porträt aus Büchern. 17 See John M. Krois, Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Symbolic Forms and the Problem of Value (Pennsylvania State University: Dissertation, 1975) and his Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987) along with the 2008 special issue of Cassirer Studies on “Philosophy and Iconology.” 18 WIA Ia 1.3.1 Annual Report of 1923, 2. 19 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), xviii. 20 See Giorgio Agamben, “Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science,” id.: Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 89-103; the notion of „nameless science“ already came in use during the late-nineteenth century. 21 Georges Didi-Huberman, “Foreword: Knowledge: Movement (The Man Who Spoke to Butterflies),” Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (New York: Zone Books, 2004), 7-19, 14. Penultimate version. Please, refer to the srcinal in print! DOI: 10.1086/690581 4 repetitive action.” 22 This history of the humanist tradition involved “rational” and “irrational” aspects in equal measure. The study of myth or “primitive” rituals could reveal as much about human culture as the study of canonical texts or artwork. The economical and systematic thought of Cassirer was confronted with Warburg’s profligate use of materials to the extent that his papers resembled flotsam of wreckage from projects never finished and texts to be written. And yet they shared a notion of the humanist tradition embodied as Erbmasse. That was precisely why they were able to think about the history of the humanities in concreto. After all it was one of the characteristics of Warburg’s writings to “make his general point of view show through his formulations without divorcing it from the particular,” 23 while Cassirer, a master of abstraction, aimed at a philosophical analysis of the symbolic forms present in the materials. Prompted by this convergence the main question I pursue in this article is rather simple: How can we describe scholarly production as a process of intellectual labor with what is at hand? In response, I want to maintain that what I call epistemic surroundings allow for the emergence of a particular style of thinking. Furthermore Warburg and Cassirer are two emblematic figures within a particular configuration in the history of the humanities. They thereby allow us to think about this question in relation to the larger problematic that it implies. The arguments I present follow the work and thinking of these contrasting conceptual figures from a historical and theoretical distance that should allow us to put forward a model for research in the history of the humanities. Layered Spaces of Thinking: Denklage and Denkraum After a brief absence, one of Warburg’s library assistants, Gertrud Bing, was trying to find orientation in the new books that had been acquired during the previous two and a half months. She was checking the new call numbers in order to find the “necessary connection with the time and ‘ Denklage ’,” 24 as she notes in the library journal. Denklage was not only a curious choice of word here; it also remained singular throughout the volumes of the journal. Denklage, in short, translates as the situation, the site, and constellation of thinking , and can also refer to the lay or the layers of thought. As she would describe it in a later account the Warburg library was a curious combination of museum and laboratory. “It is a laboratory in so far as it devotes itself to a specialized field of research, the interest in and the method of which it seeks to promote; … On the other hand its scope, the tracing of Greek and Roman tradition in post-classical 22 Christopher S. Wood: “Dromenon,” Common Knowledge, 18 (2012) 1, 106-116, 111. 23 Gertrud Bing, “A. M. Warburg,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 28 (1965), 299-313, 302. 24 Aby Warburg, Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg , ed. Karen Michels and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 31 Penultimate version. Please, refer to the srcinal in print! DOI: 10.1086/690581 5 civilization, is wide enough to allow its library to range over nearly the whole history of civilization, the documents of which literary and pictorial, are displayed in the arrangement of the library and photograph collection very much in the same way a museum displays its treasures. … its “workshop” nature determined not only the outlines of its collections but also their arrangement, their classification, housing, and working organization.” 25 What Bing describes here is the site for a history of the humanities in the making—an unfinished process of arranging and rearranging books and materials to allow for new connections that were meant to facilitate novel ways of thinking with and along the humanist tradition. 26 Bing’s notion of Denklage echos Warburg’s concept of Denkraum (space or place of thinking). He first develops this line of argument within a critique of increasing technologization. “In a struggle over the intellectual and spiritual connections (vergeistigte Verknüpfung) between man and environment, mythical and symbolic thinking creates space as space for contemplation (Andachtsraum) or space of thinking (Denkraum) that is robbed by the electric momentary connections 27 if a disciplined humanity fails to reinstall the resistance of the conscious.” 28 The main goal of the kind of cultural inquiry Warburg had in mind was to create a space of thinking that introduced a certain distance to the object of research. 29 As we will see later on, it was exactly this notion of distance between subject and object that collapsed during Warburg’s mental illness: since during those years he was haunted by a demonic possession “of lifeless things.” 30 Ultimately, Warburg’s method involved an ethics of acknowledging the other through a sense of remoteness. How can these two notions of a place of thinking and the specific layers of this intellectual space help our understanding of the Warburg library as an epistemic surrounding? The library both enabled and limited Warburg’s and Cassirer’s work in productive ways. The notion of epistemic surroundings helps to describe Cassirer’s thinking during his “Warburg years.” The library facilitated Cassirer’s work on a philosophy of symbolic 25 Gertrud Bing, “The Warburg Institute,” The Library Association Record , (1935), 1-8, 3. 26 “The endless work of grouping and arranging, this enormous intellectual achievement that went into the arrangement of the library has not yet become fruitful …” (author’s translation) WIA I.1, fol. 2-3. 27 Warburg’s notion echos Hermann Usener’s conception of momentary deities that became formative for Cassirer’s thinking about myth. See Ernst Cassirer, Language and Myth (New York: Harper, 1946). 28 WIA, III.93,1. 79-80. See Claudia Wedepohl, “Pathos – Polarität – Distanz – Denkraum. Eine archivarische Spurensuche,” in: Martin Treml et al., eds., Warburgs Denkraum: Formen, Motive, Materialien (München: Fink, 2014), 17-50, 18 (note 3). In this brilliant article Wedepohl shows based on erudite knowledge of the archival materials that Warburg already used the notion of “ Denkraum ” early on, for instance in a letter to the art historian Jacques Dwelshauvers dating back to 1905. 29 See the formula Warburg gives in the Tagebuch , October 6, 1929: “Denkraumschöpfung als Kulturfunktion.” 30 WIA I.10.8.1 Fritz Saxl, “Rede gehalten bei der Gedächtnis-Feier für Professor Warburg am 5. Dezember 1929,” 11.
