Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg's Atlas of Images

5. Metaphorologies: Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel

5 Metaphorologies: Nietzsche, Blumenberg, and Hegel Nietzsche: Waking the Dead (Metaphor) As he tried to widen the scope and refine the method of his Kulturwissenschaft, Warburg wrestled with giants whose historiographies had shaped the fields he hoped to map. To begin with, there was J.J. Winckelmann (1717–56), whose neoStoic , decidedly aesthetic interpretations of Greek culture and its imitators found “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” not only in the Laocoön statue and Plato’s philosophy , but also in Raphael’s painting.1 Partly to shake free of Winckelmann’s constricting influence on German art history, Warburg turned to Jacob Burckhardt, whose enormously influential account of Italian Renaissance culture had been increasingly eclipsed in the early decades of the twentieth century by more formalist approaches.2 Yet in grappling with the psychological and phenomenological tensions shaping Renaissance appropriations of classical art and cosmology, Warburg darkened somewhat Burckhardt’s grand vision of how individuals, by reviving the classical tradition, freed themselves from medieval shackles. He complicated 1. J.J. Winckelmann, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1969), 22. 2. Already in the “Prefatory Note” to “Art of Portraiture and the Florentine Bourgeoise,” Warburg declares his hope of supplementing Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) by interpreting “visual art” with reference to the “psychology of the individual in society” (RPA, 186). 142 Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images his encounter with Burckhardt’s Renaissance, that is, by involving his own selfconsciousness , for, again, the Nachleben der Antike was for Warburg a vital problem demanding an ethical response as much as an intellectual-historical one. Thus the dynamics of ethos and pathos strongly shapes his reception of Burckhardt. Fittingly , it colors more strongly still his judgments about Burckhardt’s one-time colleague , and author of The Use and Abuse of History for Life, Friedrich Nietzsche.3 When Warburg gave seminars on Burckhardt at Hamburg University in the summer semester of 1927 and winter semester of 1927–28, he devoted his last session to a comparison of Burckhardt and Nietzsche. Portions of his notes for this session survive, and they greatly illuminate the contours of his late thinking. Warburg ’s vivid metaphorics gives direct expression to those same historical and psychological polarities he tries to chart, and thereby resolve, in Mnemosyne: Wir müssen Burckhardt und Nietzsche als Auffänger der mnemischen Wellen erkennen und sehen, dass das, was sie als Weltbewusstsein haben, sie beide in ganz anderer Weise ergreift. . . . Beide sind sehr empfindliche Seismographen, die in ihren Grundfesten beben, wenn sie die Wellen empfangen und weitergeben müssen. Aber ein grosser Unterschied: Burckhardt hat die Wellen aus der Region der Vergangenheit empfangen, hat die gefährlichen Erschütterungen gefühlt und dafür gesorgt, dass das Fundament seines Seismographen gestärkt wurde. Er hat zu den äussersten Schwingungen, obgleich er sie erlitt, nie völlig und unbedenklich ja gesagt.4 We must recognize Burckhardt and Nietzsche as receivers of mnemonic waves, and we have to see that what they possess as world-consciousness, they grasp in completely different ways. . . . Both are very sensitive seismographs, which shake in their foundations when they receive and have to retransmit the waves. But there is a huge difference: Burckhardt received the waves from the region of the past; he felt the dangerous trembling and therefore took care that his seismograph’s foundation was strengthened. He never fully and unhesitatingly affirmed the most extreme oscillations , although he suffered them. To have a finely attuned “consciousness of the world” (Weltbewusstsein) is to be sensitive to history’s recurring ruptures, polarities, and processes, but it also is, as Warburg’s observation about the way Burckhardt avoids representing “the most 3. Before Nietzsche left academia, he and Burckhardt taught in the early 1870s at the University of Basel. Nietzsche sent copies of all of his books to Burckhardt, seeking, without success, the historian’s approbation. And when he fell into madness in Turin in 1889, Nietzsche addressed some of his most desperate, unbalanced, but astonishingly lyrical letters to the much older Burckhardt. 4. Warburg, WIA, III.113.2.3, Schlussitzung der Burckhardt Übungen, fol. 1. On what technology may inform the seismograph metaphor, see Didi-Huberman, L’image survivante, 117–125. Schlangenritual (107) offers an earlier use of the metaphor at a moment when Warburg was literally trying to prove his own reliability-objectivity as a scientific “seismograph.” Metaphorologies 143 extreme oscillations” suggests, to make strong...