Moxey's Moxie and the Summers of '84

in no sense mere counterfeit or facsimile, but a genuine manifestation of our inner life.2 Its and our are the lock and key of this manifold in perception,3 and Keith Moxey is quite right in his essay in this issue of New Literary History to see the reciprocal dualism of subject and in Cassirer and Panofsky as a legacy of Kantian rationalism. According to Kant, Humean sensory empiricism fails to account for the immutable forms of our knowledge; and if, with Hume, we can never know the thing-in-itself lurks beyond experience, we can nevertheless, with Kant, truly know when it is we have arrived at all we can know. Within the epistemological enterprise of foundational, self-certain cognition we stand judiciously (and juridically) over and against the of categorical consciousness in a timeless instant of transcendental apperception. Kant's transcendental subject, then, is seen as a pure, logical, ahistorical regulatory system.4 Moxey is right to suggest Panofsky's analytic categories smack largely of noncontingent Kantian necessity.5 This is especially evident in the (in)famous synoptical table in which Panofsky lays out his methodology in schematic form.6 Under the rubric object of interpretation Panofsky distinguishes three alleged objects comprise the work of art, the primary or natural subject matter, the secondary or conventional subject matter, and the intrinsic meaning or content. In an uncelebrated preliminary disclaimer, however, Panofsky insists that the neatly differentiated categories, which in this synoptical table seem to indicate three independent spheres of meaning, refer in reality to aspects of one phenomenon, namely, the work of art as a (p. 39). I take this phenomenal whole of the work to be more closely assimilable to the matter (die Sache) of Gadamer's hermeneutical activity than Moxey allows, but Moxey is surely right

Art · Art history · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Hermeneutics and Narrative Identity · History · Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence · Philosophy · Pragmatism in Philosophy and Education

• An essay on man

  Ernst Cassirer•An essay on man•1972

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• The Manifold in Perception

  M R HAIGHT, Marjorie Haight et al.•The Philosophical Quarterly•1973

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