Thinking in Images. Thought and Image in Panofsky’s and Florensky’s Theory of Symbolic Forms

Abstract

An important philosophical tradition makes of the imagination one of the main faculties of philosophy and of images the fundamental medium of metaphysical knowledge. If in the West-European thought, starting from the Counter-Reformation, there was an oblivion of the imaginary, in the Christian East the image, in the form of Icons, remained to symbolize divine reality, and at the same time to mark the boun dary of the sensible with it. The Platonic tradition of the symbolic image re-emerges with force in Florensky’s aestetics and theological thought, whose observations and hermeneutic analyses, contained in the books Iconostasis and Obratnaya perspectiva, presuppose a conception of thought and spiritual life closely linked to spatiality and images. On the background of this conception he elaborates an aesthetic of the Icon and of pictorial representation as a symbol of the invisible  metaphysical dimension of Being and of the relationship that the subject has with this. Parallel to Florensky’s hermeneutics of linear perspective, developed on the basis of philosophemes of Platonic-Christian origin, another one was developed in the 1920s, parallel and independent, based on neo-Kantian conceptual premises, which led to the publication of Perspective as a symbolic form by E. Panofsky. Although the two points of view appear diffi cult to reconcile at fi rst glance, considering the harsh criticisms directed by Florensky towards the neo-Kantianism of the Marburg School, in this paper we will demonstrate that they come to results of astonishing similarity, though presenting irreconcilable differences in the underlying assumptions of their thinking.