Abstract

The German philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hans Blumenberg have thought differently about the role of the ‘image’ in thought. This article presents Cassirer as the philosopher of ‘reading’, whereas Blumenberg appears as the philosopher of ‘seeing’. Cassirer wants to show that each act of figurative-pictorial inner representation in thought can be deconstructed into smaller elements of signs that need to be “read” before they can be “seen.” In turn, Blumenberg bases the very act of conceptual thinking on rhetoric, namely on the figurative images that are literally ‘visible’ in the structure of metaphors. In his underground of thought, “seeing” precedes “reading”. By situating these two approaches in the context of the post-Kantian quarrel over the use of images in 20th century physics, this article uncovers some of the pre-history of what has today become known as the “visual turn” in the humanities.