Cassirer’s Archeological Approach to Aesthetics

To help understand what prevented Cassirer from writing a philosophy of art as an organic part of his philosophy of symbolic forms, this paper proposes to go back to the studies in which Cassirer addressed the establishment of philosophical aesthetics during the 18th century. Cassirer has been showing interest in this question since his 1902 monograph on Leibniz’s system. An interest later developed in both 1916 Freiheit und Form and 1932 Philosophie der Aufklärung. On all these occasions Cassirer takes on an attitude that is not merely reconstructive but “archaeological.” For he seeks to shed light on the movements that prompted the foundation of philosophical aesthetics, meant as issues that – by thematizing, with the dimension of the sensible, a form of meaningfulness irreducible to mere cognition – critically tackle modern thought, which instead tends to resolve itself at the level of a theory of knowledge. The archaeological approach leads Cassirer to detect behind philosophical aesthetics proper a powerful matrix that goes back to Leibniz and finds amplification when joint with Shaftesbury’s thought. Thus, an operative framework of the aesthetic emerges that profoundly affects Cassirer’s own conception of “symbolic form,” showing how this perspective is connoted by an aesthetic feature. A feature that increasingly pushes it toward its distinctive anthropological outcome.