Abstract
In this text I will try to combine at least two, perhaps even three different interests. First, my curiosity as to how Cassirer’s thought may prove its worth in helping to dissolve contemporary epistemological dead-ends; second, my long-time involvement with cave art studies and cave art; third, implicitly, my own doxological approach to contemporary theory of knowledge.1 I will try to achieve this combination by briefly presenting what I see as two major problems within the study of cave art: first, the ubiquitous urge for an origin and, second, what I am going to call the mimetic curse in cave art studies; I will then proceed to show that Cassirer’s ideas about symbolic forms and, more specifically, his philosophy of technology may help us to dissolve these problems, focusing mainly on his concept of ‘organ-projection’ and on the notion of symbolic forms understood as ever-changing ways to produce human reality; finally, I will comment upon the topicality of both Cassirer’s thoughts and of cave art. My aim is to show that Cassirer’s notions of technology and of symbolic forms may, to a certain extent, provide a new conceptual (and as it were doxological) framework for cave art studies, within which the centennial question of the sense of the traces found in the caves could be addressed anew in a productive way.
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Notes
Since 2002 I have been developing an ‘other’, rhetorical take on epistemology. I call this stance doxological in order to emphasize that all knowledge is doxic knowledge, thus turning the seminal Platonic distinction between doxa (beliefs, opinions) and episteme (objective, eternal knowledge) upside down. Protagoras dictum about man as the measure of all things is, perhaps, the most poignant expression of a doxological position. Departing from the pivotal question ‘What would a Protagorean position imply for epistemology today?’, I propose a critique of the purely discursive notion of knowledge, still central in Anglo-Saxon epistemology, emphasizing the fact that our knowledge is always embodied–in ourselves as biological beings; formulated and/or preserved in some language, institution or ritual; practised and upheld by one or many individuals, always in one historical moment or other and within the admittedly diffuse framework of an ever-changing but still specific social situation. Doxology is not a relativism abandoning all claims to objectivity or science–far from it–but an attempt, in the wake of the serious and fundamental criticisms of the late twentieth century, to readdress and reconsider how we can conceive of knowledge, science and objectivity today. Please also note that I use the term ‘doxology’ in a completely non-theologian sense, as a designation for an epistemological stance, exploring not episteme, but doxa. See Mats Rosengren, Doxologi: En essii om kunskap (Åstorp: Rhetor, 2002), in French translation as, Doxologie: Essai sur la connassiance ( Paris: Hermann, 2011 ).
For an historic overview of the different attempts at interpreting cave art, see, for example, David Lewis-Williams, The Mind in the Cave (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002), and
Anati Emanuele, Aux Origines de L’art ( Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2003 ).
John Clegg, ‘Pictures and Pictures of…’, in Paul Bahn and Andrée Rosenfeld (eds), Rock Art and Prehistory Papers Presented to Symposium G of the Aura Congress, Darwin 1998 (Oxford: Oxbow Monograph 10, 1991), 109–10. Even though I find the comments on perception just quoted quite convincing, I do not share Clegg’s general approach (that the problem is only one of vocabulary) nor his conclusion (111) (that ‘there is a need for a convention to indicate whether a term is in use as a name or label’) presented in his article.
Jean Louis Schefer, Questions d’art paléothique (Paris: POL, 1999 ). All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.
Jean Clottes and David Lewis-Williams, Les chamanes de la préhistorie: Texte integral, polemique et réponses ( Paris: La maison des roches, 2001 ), 45.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3: The Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. Ralph Manheim ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957 ), 202.
Allister Neher, ‘How Perspective could be a Symbolic Form’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63: 4 (2005), 360.
The full story is presented in Michel Lorblanchet, Les grottes ornées de la Préhistoire: Nouveaux regards (Paris: Errance, 1995), 209–23 and partly updated in Lorblanchet et al., Chamanisme et Arts Préhistoriques.
A recent example is Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters: Probing the Mysteries of the World’s First Artists ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006 ).
See, for example, Annette Laming-Emperaire, La Signification de l’Art Rupestre Paléolotique (Paris: Editions A. et J. Picard, 1962) and Leroi-Gourhan, L’art pariétal.
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Rosengren, M. (2012). Cave Art as Symbolic Form. In: Hoel, A.S., Folkvord, I. (eds) Ernst Cassirer on Form and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007773_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137007773_11
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