Symbol and Intuition

Comparative Studies in Kantian and Romantic-period Aesthetics

Helmut Huehn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351193177
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Languages

"That a symbolic object or work of art participates in what it signifies, as a part within a whole, was a controversial claim discussed with particular intensity in the wake of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment. It informed the aesthetic theories of a constellation of writers in Jena and Weimar around 1800, including Moritz, Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. Yet the twin concepts of symbol and intuition were not only tools of literary and mythological criticism: they were integral even to questions of epistemology and methodology in the fields of theology, metaphysics, history and natural philosophy. The international contributors to this volume further explore how both the explanatory potential and peculiar dissatisfactions of the symbol entered the Anglo-American discourse, focusing on Coleridge, Crabb Robinson and Emerson. Contemporary debates about the claims of symbolic as opposed to allegorical art are kept in view throughout."

CHAPTER 1
Kant's Transformation of the Symbol-Concept

Stephan Meier-Oeser

Traditional Ambiguities of the Notions of 'Symbol' and 'Intuition'

It is conventional wisdom that Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment is ‘one of the important source texts for all Romantic theories of art’.¹ For with Kant, who marks an ‘important climax in the history of symbol theory’,² begins the career of the notion of symbol within aesthetics,³ so that — if Romantic aesthetics can be condensed into the single word ‘symbol’⁴ — Kant’s third Critique ‘made romanticism possible’.⁵

Symbol and intuition: the two basic notions that mark the focus of the present volume are loaded with a variety of conceptual implications that have accrued to them from the long history of their use in philosophical language. An assessment of Kant’s conception of these central notions of eighteenth-century epistemology and of the mode and limitation of their impact on Romantic-period aesthetics, therefore, has to take its point of departure from a closer look at their older Begriffsgeschichte. For it is only against this deeper historical background that both the terminological decisions Kant makes in some respects and his seeming undecidedness in some others may become sufficiently intelligible.

Already in ancient times the notions of symbol and intuition are affected by some fundamental ambiguities. Etymologically, the Greek noun ‘symbolon’ derives from the verb ‘symballein’ (συμβάλλειν), which most literally signifies ‘to throw together’, but was used in a wide range of meanings including those of ‘to connect’, and ‘to collect’, ‘to compare’ and ‘to bring together mentally’, ‘to conjecture’ (from the Latin conicere) and ‘to meet (or agree) with something or someone’.

Under these circumstances it is not surprising that later on the term ‘symbol’ takes on a number of meanings which are partly overlapping and partly contrasting. It may stand, inter alia, not only 1) for the sign in general but also — even though in different theoretical contexts — for the two mutually exclusive classes of 2) the arbitrary linguistic sign and 3) that special kind of natural sign, which, in contrast to mere conventional signs, is founded upon analogy between the sign and the signified.⁶

While the ‘symbol’ in the sense of a linguistic sign based on a social agreement amongst the members of a speaking community goes back to Aristotle, its opposite conception as an analogy-based allegorical sign has its roots in the Stoic interpretation of mythical texts,⁷ and later on acquired a fundamental importance for the late antique and medieval tradition of symbolic theology. Whereas in the former case the classification of a sign as ‘symbolic’ indicates its stipulated or conventional mode of signifying (θέσει καὶ συμβολικῶς)⁸ and thus refers to the relation between the sign users, in the latter case it refers to the relation of analogy that holds between the sign and its significate, especially between corporeal signs and spiritual significates.⁹ Since late antiquity, a characteristic feature of this analogy-based symbol was deemed to be its non-discursive mode of signifying.¹⁰ Hence, in the Middle Ages a speech could be called symbolical because in it — as Alanus of Lille explained by a somewhat outlandish etymology — ‘the whole is comprehended at once’ (‘locutio [...] symbolica [...] dicitur a “sin”, quod est simul, et “olon”, quod est totum, quia in tali locutione simul totum comprehenditur’).¹¹

No less affected by ambiguity is the term ‘intuition’ (intuitus, intuitio), the Latin translation of the Greek epibole (ἐπιβολή), which was coined as a philosophical term by the Epicureans to characterize an instantaneous grasping (ἀθρόα ἐπιβολή) of the entire object in contrast to a merely partial conception of it (κατὰ μέρος). In the course of the Late Antique adoption of Hellenistic philosophemes the term epibole was semantically modified by making it the opposite of discursive thought (διεξοδικὸς λόγος).¹² This provided leeway for ambiguity (or diversification), given that while epibole in Epicurean philosophy was originally used to mark visual sense perception it later became primarily or even, as in some Neoplatonic authors like Plotinus, exclusively a constitutive feature of intellectual cognition.

In the scholastic tradition the corresponding Latin term intuitus as well as the adjective ‘intuitive’ qualify both sensible and intellectual cognition (intuitus mentis). Besides its opposition to discursive cognition (viz. deductive reasoning and inference), intuitive cognition, due to a distinction successfully introduced by Duns Scotus in the fourteenth century, enters into antithesis to what is called ‘abstractive cognition’. The distinction of cognitio intuitiva and cognitio abstractiva, a subject of many medieval debates, has received various interpretations. Commonly, however, intuitive cognition in this context is understood as a cognition the object of which is attained immediately in itself or, in the case of sense perception, as present to the cognizer in time and space; whereas abstractive cognition attains its object only indirectly through a representing form or medium (in aliquo medio repraesentativo) like a phantasm, as for instance in the case of memory and imagination. While according to this terminology, on the one hand, every discursive cognition, relying on sign operations in one way or another, is an abstractive cognition, there are, on the other hand, instances of abstractive cognition (viz. remembrance and imagination) which are not discursive. This dissymetry results from the criterial diversity concern ing the mode in which intuitive cognition is contradistinct to discursive and abstractive cognition respectively. Whereas the former discrimination of intuitive from discursive cognition regards its temporal structure of immediately compassing the object at once in its entirety (simul totum), the distinction of intuitive from abstractive cognition refers to the immediacy of presenting the object in itself. Insofar, therefore, as according to scholastic terminology, cognitio abstractiva abstracts from the immediate presentiality of the object rather than from its particularity, intellection is usually described as intuitive cognition and imagination as abstractive cognition.

Leibniz's Distinction of cognitio intuitiva and cognitio symbolica

In late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century epistemology the ambiguities which traditionally adhere to the notions of symbol and intuition are still effective and become particularly apparent or even multiplied in the framework of the various topical distinctions between forms of knowledge labelled as symbolic, intuitive, discursive, and abstract cognition.

Of pivotal importance for the conceptual history of the two notions of intuition and symbol in the philosophy of enlightenment are Leibniz’s 1684 Meditationes de cognitione, veritate et ideis, where he delineates a dichotomically structured hierarchy of modes of cognition. Based on Descartes but ultimately in direct confrontation with Cartesian epistemology, Leibniz here distinguishes in the first instance between obscure and clear cognition (cognitio obscura — clara) and then divides clear cognition in turn into confused and distinct cognition (cognitio confusa — distincta); the latter of which again is subdivided into inadequate and adequate cognition (cognitio inadaequata — adaequata) on the one hand, and into symbolic and intuitive cognition (cognitio symbolica — intuitiva) on the other. The most perfect of these is (or rather: would be) an adequate intuitive cognition (cognitio adaequata intuitiva),¹³ i.e. a distinct and instantaneous (à la fois) conception of a complex notion together with all its partial notions.¹⁴ According to Leibniz, however, such an intuitive or pure intellection (pura intellectio), which Descartes conceived of as an essential feature of the human mind warranting its independence from and superiority to the realm of sensibility and imagination, is a mere limit-concept. For he regards the pure form of intuitive cognition as hardly ever accessible to the human intellect¹⁵ — and then, if at all, only with regard to the most simple objects or notions.¹⁶

It is obvious that Leibniz’s distinction between intuitive and symbolic cognition is closely related to the conceptual history of these terms. This becomes especially evident when Leibniz defines intuitive cognition — which he considers a borderline case hardly ever given — by the ancient criterion of simul totum, i.e. as simultaneously conceiving all constitutive moments of an object or concept. Nevertheless it is not the negation of the simul totum that characterizes symbolic in contrast to intuitive cognition, but rather — and here the scholastic determination of abstractive cognition as a ‘cognitio in aliquo medio repraesentativo’ comes into effect — the substitution of the cognitive total presence of the object by an intuitively cognizable sign.

Provided that the simultaneity of cognition is what essentially gives the evidence of an object’s unity,¹⁷ the incapacity of the limited human intellect to comprehend the content of any more complex concept other than successively makes it necessary that in the process of reasoning the complex concept of the thing itself is substituted by an instantaneously conceivable sensible sign (or by an imagination of it), always supposing that a detailed explication of its meaning could be given if needed. Leibniz, therefore, maintains that human knowledge of complex objects or notions is always symbolic, i.e. performed in the medium of signs.¹⁸ His doctrine of symbolic cognition, claiming a necessary commitment of intellectual thought to the sensible and thus ‘corporeal’ medium of signs, has as its metaphysical basis his system of pre-established harmony of body and soul which he formulates in direct opposition to the Cartesian substance dualism and the intellectual intuitionism implied therein. For it is, as Leibniz underlines, an immediate consequence of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Kant's Transformation of the Symbol-Concept
• 2 'Mere Nature in the Subject': Kant on Symbolic Representation of the Absolute
• 3 'Neither mere allegories nor mere history": Multi-layered Symbolism in Moritz's Andreas Hartknopf
• 4 Comparative Morphology and Symbolic Mediation in Goethe
• 5 Friedrich Schlegel's Symbol-Concept
• 6 Bread, Wine and Water: Hegel's Distinction between Mystical and Symbolical in The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate
• 7 'All are but parts of one stupendous whole'? Henry Crabb Robinson's Dilemma
• 8 The Spark of Intuitive Reason: Coleridge's 'On the Prometheus of Aeschylus'
• 9 Emerson's Exegesis: Transcending Symbols
• 10 Pointing at Hidden Things: Intuition and Creativity
• 11 Aesthetic Cognition and Aesthetic Judgment
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index