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Iconopoiesis - between heuresis and mimesis Artistic science as mediator of the creative process

By Vasco N. Medeiros

Vasco N. Medeiros (Paris 1970) - Painter, PhD student and investigator of the Art History

Institute at the Faculty of Letters, University of Lisbon. E-mail: medeiros@campus.ul.pt

Abstract

Art, in its innate expressivity, is conditioned by complex forms, being articulated

fundamentally by the acts of projecting and doing that are themselves moulded by

pre-existing technological systems. How did this poiesis manifest itself on the formal level?

Fundamentally through the evolution of pictorial science in the course of the 16th and 17th

centuries and in the implementation of new scientific and operating processeses applied to

the mediation between heuresis and mimesis. A substantial part of the intrinsic meaning of

the image lay precisely in the choice and application of an avant-garde praxis on the part of

the author.

hroughout this paper, we shall be proposing a fresh look at problems that,

although eternal, remain controversial and the focus of disagreements in the

various disciplines relating to art. We refer to something that, because it is

so natural and indissociable from the artistic object, has nevertheless been strangely absent

from the history of art in recent centuries: the artistic "act of making" and its natural

cyclothymic pattern. It is important to define here the extent of this operational act that

registers in the world traces of a unique singularity -- marks of a will and of a representation

that is robustly associated with man. Artistic creation is flanked by two paradoxical realities.

On the one hand it is constituted by a pure reverberation of a heuresis, a cosmic vision that is

indissociable from its author; as such, creation is idea, shadow and intention. On the other

T

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hand, all the operational verbs

contribute to its opening to the

world of the senses; creating is

thus action, impetus, ingenuity,

science, artifice. We thus find

that in affirming its “shadow” in

the semiotic world of meaning,

the work of art fundamentally

constitutes a summation of acts

and decisions, served by the

technological and natural

resources placed at the artist's

disposition. The "act of making" in art thus occupies a threshold between two apparently

opposite worlds, constituting per se a transitory vehicle and formulating the concatenation

between mimesis and heuresis, in other words, the unfolding of being, mediated by the

experience of apprehension and representation of the world. This formulation reveals the

primordial dimension that the act of creation takes on, that is, the unification of what

Schopenhauer describes as "the gulf between the subjective ideal and the objective real."1

For the history of art, this substantial echo of the work as an "act of making" has

always been disfigured, transposed to historically traditional aesthetic and erudite patterns,

and translated into iconographic and iconological codes. These, rendered into false canons

far from the very moment of creation, certainly constitute an undeniable ballast of centuries

of thoughts, deductions and impositions. While these deductions do indeed enable us to

assess part of the symbolic “formula” that results from the use of a vocabulary that is

historically ascertained, the marks that the productive intention necessarily generates, as

inherent to the modus faciendi, are by contrast not translated there. So where is the author,

behind the iconographic and iconological aridity that submerges the meaning of the "act of

making" in the urgency of interpretation?

1 - Rembrant. The Artist in his Studio. circa 1626-28. Museum of Fine Arts.

Boston

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Beleaguered as it is

between the analytic and

formal capacity of the image

and its subsequent symbolic

interpretation, much of the

meaning intrinsic to the work

thanks to the operational act

that introduces it into the

world is lost. This "Dilemma

of the visible", in the phrase

of Georges Didi-Huberman2,

for whom the “Iconological”

tradition is not sufficient to

encompass art, leads us to the

heart of our question. It will certainly be agreed that the sciences of art, both historical and

scientific, formulate the image that is possible of the author, his work and his time. An

author, according to Rudolf Wittkower, which can never be ignored, «Art has always been

produced by individuals and a lack of literary information about them does not mean that

they had no individuality.»3

Nevertheless, these two disciplines seek to circumscribe the work exactly, in the

exact measure of its material manifestation, whether in the field of the semiotic interpretation

of the visible or in the scientific analysis of the invisible. However, they are well away from

the very moment of creation, in other words, from the will that the "act of making" institutes

as meaning.

It would be fair to recognise here that the promotion of the operative act as the

founding fulcrum of artistic genesis has always been the prime concern of philosophy, to the

detriment of history and artists, for whom the "act of making" is rarely set up as a real

symbolic form. The reason, in our view, is the fact that the history of art, lost in its own

philological labyrinth in search of an obsessive textual claim, has lost sight of the guiding

thread between the work and its creator, which is the genuine essence of creation. We can

2 - The "act of making" in art thus occupies a threshold between two apparently

opposite worlds, constituting per se a transitory vehicle and formulating the

concatenation between mimesis and heuresis.

4

This position, is also put forward

by Martin Heidegger when he

addresses the Origin of the Work

of Art, taking the view that "The

workly aspect of the work consists

in its being-created (seinem

Geschaffensein) by the artist."4,

and formulating the overriding

question: "With what guiding

thread, if not with handwork, are

we then to think the essence of

creation?"5

In this way we are

inevitably forced to create new

structures to enable a reading of the

whole work that is sensitive to this field of action and contemplates all the cyclical

parameters that constitute it: perception, trial, idea, formulation, expression, construction

and manifestation. The work then rests on a transitory and imperceptible level, in the artist's

contemplation of the canvas, in the poet's gaze at the sheet of paper, in that micro-instant of

action -- the perfect conjugation between will and representation. It's here and only here that

we find this Being-work that the work conveys within itself, as a genuine formula of

revealing. This unique character of the action is highlighted by Ernst Cassirer when he states

"We cannot understand or feel a great work of art without, to a certain extent, repeating and

reconstructing the creative process by which it has come into being."6 In this way we are

inevitably forced to create new structures to enable a reading of the whole work that is

sensitive to this field of action and contemplates all the cyclical parameters that constitute it:

perception, trial, idea, formulation, expression, construction and manifestation. In this way

the language of art configures a clear and objective transposition of the idea to perceptible

forms, but this language is undoubtedly distorted by a universe of philological and accessory

meaning that surrounds the work, transfiguring its essence. Lionello Venturi characterises

this accessory universe as an intrinsic and natural fragility of the history of art criticism that

3 - "We cannot understand or feel a great work of art without, to a certain

extent, repeating and reconstructing the creative process by which it has

come into being."

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reveals the addition of

elements that are external

and parasitical to the

essence of the artistic

object: "History was

reduced to chronicle and,

given that this way of

viewing history, without

judgment, seemed in the

case of the history of art --

even to more elementary

minds -- absurd, judgment was improvised." According to the author, this judgment was

derived from canonical elements alien to art, such as "(…)academic tradition(…), scientific

truth, the moral law, the history of customs"7...

The analysis of the "noise" that later interpretations attached to the work also

constitutes matter for reflection for Umberto Eco, in the form of the author's definition of the

various significative "intentions" that surround a work, as are patent in the triadic

formulation: intentio auctoris, intentio operis and intentio lectoris8. It becomes clear that the

historian and the critic look at the work exclusively from the point of view of an intentio

lectoris, that is, an intention to read, a point of view. So we may well ask: where is the

intention of the author himself, but above all where is that intentional and autonomous flux

that the "act of making" itself implies, that is, the hidden intentional truth of the work? So we

see that the odd historical-critical positioning downstream from the creative act manifests

itself almost always in the imposition of an autoritas -- the structural cradle of the canons of

atemporal meaning, grouping together authors, enumerating and classifying lives and works

by mannerisms, by colours, by formulae, and by social, cultural, religious, aesthetic and

philosophical currents, ad infinitum. In reality this subtraction of the intimate character of the

essence of the work through its fixing in a canon makes the question unavoidable -- the

formulation of a canonical list automatically impairs the nature of the works that comprise it,

as it establishes itself in their place as a thing in itself and transforms the works, according to

4 - "Art-history-research (die Kunstgeschichtsforschung) makes the works into

objects of science. Yet, in all this agitation do we encounter the works themselves?"

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Heidegger, into things of the world

of art: "Art-history-research (die

Kunstgeschichtsforschung) makes

the works into objects of science. Yet,

in all this agitation do we encounter

the works themselves?"9 Once more,

for the philosopher it is important to

question the essence of art and its true reconstitution in the observer, by asking whether the

nature of the work and its subsequent use are compatible, or whether they constitute a

continuation of -- or an ontological break with its nature, "(...) are they there in themselves as

the works they themselves are, or are they not there rather as objects of the art business?"10

So we conclude that the world attached to works of art, that orbits around them without,

however, sharing in their essence, is in reality the world that ties, characterises, interprets,

exposes, destroys and mutilates them and their innate aura.

The intrinsic character of the essence of the object, which is totally independent from

the establishment of the canon, is thus associated to its being-work, in a direct correlation

with its being-created by an artist, through an act -- that of creation -- a Poiesis. This

formulation presupposes from the outset the tutelage of a praxis, that is, of a Poiesis

immanent in the being-work of the work. Contributing to this is the overriding need for the

artistic object to manifest its essence, mediated by a material support, that is, a natural "field

for artistic forming"11

, complementing the eidetic universe of a being that, according to Ernst

Cassirer, "cannot live its life without expressing its life". In this way we obtain a formula we

believe to be fertile and operatively applicable, based on the double conjunction of the image

– Icon (eikon) – with the verb Make/model – Poiesis – which is the root of «Poetic» or

«Poetry», meaning simply "the act of making". This structure constitutes the foundations of a

science of the technical elaboration of image and form, a possible science of the interval,

which mediates the idea of the work latent in heuresis and its sensible manifestation in the

world of mimesis, that is, Iconopoiesis.

5 - "field for artistic forming"

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The idea is of course not stated here for the first time, given that interdisciplinary

efforts and contributions are involved in this much desired conjugation. We can safely cite as

a seminal effort Ernst Cassirer's work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms12

, where the

framework of an epistemology takes shape that is strictly conjugated with "action" to the

detriment of a contemplative and interpretative vision of the cosmos. It was from this work

that Erwin Panofsky was to develop the interpretative key of his work Perspective as

Symbolic Form13

, in which he proposes in broad outline that the transformation of a

“perspectiva naturalis” into a “perspectiva artificialis” implied a clear reformulation of

man's cognitive and psycho-physiological systems, through an innovative symbolic "act of

making". It is worth defining the modos operandi implied in this revolution -- the way it was

manifested in a pure or abstract discourse, equipped with arid concepts unintelligible to

human cognition, and turning into a cultural and symbolic entity – in short, an "act of

making" furnished with a semiotic meaning. While Panofsky's theory constitutes an

indisputable milestone on the road in that history of art set off towards an understanding of

the artistic manifestation as an "act of making", its importance resides fundamentally in the

interest it awoke in postwar historians. The postwar period was also to bring a post-Panofsky

period, personified by Rudolf Arnheim, Ernst Gombrich, Martin Kemp, Hans Belting and

others. All these authors took a distinct approach, associated much more with an interaction

between science and art, equipped with a new and fruitful point of view launched in a century

in which the "act of making" undoubtedly became the semiotic force par excellence. In the

20th century, technique was to become per se the intrinsic "value" of the work definitely

6 - Albrecht Dürer. 1525. Underweysung der Messung.

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separating history and art criticism. In

speaking of trompe-l’oeil, collage,

grattage, frottage, décollage, dripping

etc., we are not merely listing

operative processes, but invoking

symbolic forms of expression that are

self-sufficient and full of meaning. So

it was in that century that a science

such as Iconopoiese was fully to take

on its epistemological character,

calling attention to the fusion between

praxis, form and meaning, and

revealing the validity of operative

processes in the overall context of the

work. However the analysis of the way

the artist imagines, projects and builds

up the work, even if this is

reconstituted in the present day, makes it possible to measure an inescapable reality: the

psychological relation of the artist with his world, with the technological resources at his

disposal and with the full affirmation of his will, constitute and have always constituted a

symbolic affirmation full of meaning. According to Giulio Carlo Argan, mythical thought

and artistic invention are subject to a praxis without which the manifestation does not take

place: «The true artistic “act of making” is (…) to project; but (…) the project remains an

abstract hypothesis or a utopia, if it is not realised taking into account the concrete,

economic and technological possibilities of realisation - the projecting artist must project in

function of the existing technological system. (…)»14

The greater or lesser degree of genius of an artist will thus consist in the integration in

his work of the technological principles of his time that best serve it in the tight command of

the forms' fluctuations, subject as they are to the natural dictatorship of matter, corsetted and

distorted as they are in their ideographic purity by the conditionalisms that the "act of

7 - Albrecht Dürer. 1525. Underweysung der Messung. «the

projecting artist must project in function of the existing technological

system».

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making" implies. In short, they are subject to the material possibilities, which depending on

his greater or lesser mastery, mutilate or sublimate the intended and primordial idea. With the

advent of the modern age, this need of a mimetic representation faithful to the imagined

reality did indeed reinforce the convergence of a cumulative discipline, creating a tenuous

divide between art and science, which according to Thomas Kuhn "only later became

categorically distinct"15

. It was precisely in response to this demand for an imagery full of

mimetism that artists and scientists were to converge, united under the idealised form of the

Uomo Universale, the Humanist. In this way a vague compilation of workshop practices was

transformed into a prolific pictorial science,

furnished not only with a corpus of theory,

but fundamentally with auxiliary procedural

and mechanical methods -- an undeniable

reflection of a true visual epistemology.

We take the view that, alongside the

tremendous conceptual break that the advent

of the Quantum Continuum represented in

the change of paradigm and in the

reformulation of the particular notion of

space-time, the advent of the technique of

Oils and of Optics, along with a myriad new

technologies, drove and constituted the

opening not of Alberti's legendary "finestra",

but of a wide door, through which nature

itself penetrated the virtual pictorial space.

This instantly wrought transformations in the way of seeing and representing, and in the

affirmation of a new perception of the world and of a renewed and revolutionary capacity of

expressing it. We should understand this Iconopoetic revolution in all its elementary

concatenation, that is, as a unifying element between North and South. While the North was

indeed first in being able to boast an unparalleled pictorial technique, in which oil painting

induced an amazing mimetic reflection of reality, the South, lacking this operational mimesis,

8 - Jan Van Eyck . 1434. The Arnolfini Wedding. National

Gallery. London.

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created the modern pictorial space

with the invention of perspective. It

was precisely from the union of these

two realities - of a mimetic north with

a perspective-championing south -

that pictorial science was to emerge as

an iconopoetic science par

excellence, an undeniable fact that

should contribute to a reformulation

of the way we see, think about and

teach the cultural and scientific

currents of the Renaissance. The

artists who came out of this

conjunction were to bring into their

new lexicon revolutionary elements

such as linear, chromatic and

atmospheric perspective, sublime

sfumatto, the introduction of optics

and of mechanical processes for the capture of the real, and composition from projection.

This innovative acquisition wrought undoubted transformations in the artistic world, in its

work processes, in the introduction of a revolutionary chromatic range, in the dynamics of

teaching painting, in the intellectual structure of the artist, in the transformation of his locus

of work, and in his representation of himself as an emerging Iconopoet.

Nevertheless, anticipating Heidegger's aphorism that "In the technical interpretation

of thinking, the Being is abandoned as an element of thinking"16

, the history of art was to

respond with undeniable suspicion to this technological paradigm. This fear originated in the

aura of genius and legend that the history of art was to attach to its object of study, the source

of its demiurgic, soteriological appearance - we are referring to the concealment of processes.

History was to invoke the principle Ars est Celare Artem - the art is in hiding the art - so

relegating the poiesis and praxis to a hidden and secret function, to the detriment of a divine

9 - Masolino da Panicale. 1425 - 1430. The Annunciation. National

Gallery of Art. (Orthogonal projection).

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illumination of genius and

epiphany. So it was that, hidden

under the face of the pictorial

science born in the modern age, the

myth of the creative genius was to

be reintroduced as part of the

foundations of civilisation - the

artist was to inherit the mythical

legacy of Apelles and Zeuxis, in a

reincarnation of the old myths

rendered by new technologies.

Despite the fact that the inevitable

convergence between science and

art during the modern age conferred

a diagrammatic embrace on the world, art and artistic creation were however not considered

as autonomous entities. Between the two is man - the genuine guardian of the creative act -

constituting, according to Lionello Venturi, the «representative of the eternal in art». In this

way, the "act of making" implicit in the opening up of the personal universe of the artist, not

only constitutes the direct reflection of the science, philosophy or religion of the time, but a

complex mimetic reverberation of the creator's heuristics, subject to the eternal dualities of

the spirit and shifting in the cyclothymic conflict that governs it.

So we seem to be floating between two opposing realities: on one hand the need to

assess the personal heuresis of the artist as the mimetic referent induced by reality, calling for

the purpose on the diagrammatic rules of pictorial science, disfiguring and imprisoning the

idea in rigid Apollonian precepts - harmonic, geometric and mathematical; according to

Cassirer, what these seek out in phenomena "(…) is much more than similarity; it is order

(…)"17

. On the other hand the imperative need of the artist to free himself from an excessive

visual and methodological rationalisation, summoning in its place the most dithyrambic

element in creation: the original purity of the idea. These two conflicting values prefigure the

return of the mythical combat between the Apollonian and Dionysian principles that were

10 - Leonardo da Vinci. 1510. Painter using a device to draw an armillary

sphere. Atlantic Codex. The Ambrosian Library. Milan.

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central to classical art and which once more emerged from the stock of archetypes that the

pictorial science of the modern age imposed on reality.

The excessive rationalism that the Apollonian imperative imposed on the arts, with its

exegesis of order, its mathematical conception of space, its absolute harmony and

compositional rigour, drained away the flux and the dynamism that the heuresis always

demanded. Ernst Cassirer establishes the high price to be paid for the triumph of scientific

reasons: «Science means abstraction and abstraction is always an impoverishment of reality.

The forms of things as they are described in scientific concepts tend ever more to become

formulae»18

. The contrast of the subjective artist with the objective artist was to translate into

the crisis of identity that the exacerbated Apollonian spirit induces in the art of the

Quattrocento, i.e., a gradual imprisonment of the «act of feeling» in the rigid formulae of the

«act of making». To the diagrammatic formula offered by Apollonian artists, Dionysian

artists were to oppose human drunkenness, the dream dimension, meta-reality. They were to

react violently to the excess of scientificity of art-turned-mathematics, to the spacial rigidity,

12 - Rosso Fiorentino. 1523. Moses Defending the

Daughters of Jethro.Uffizi Gallery. Florence.

11 – Piero della Francesca. 1472. The Brera Madonna.

Pinacoteca di Brera. Milan.

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to the debasement by perspective of man

himself, in a bid to free the Iconopoiese of

the constraints of an exacerbated

scientificity.

This imponderable, chaotic and

potentially unpredictable factor, which was

able to submerge pictorial science and

contribute to the bankruptcy of a

conceptual and harmonic model, was once

more to come from philosophy. It is found

in the Nietzsche's formulation of the

cyclothyme inherent in the Apollonian and

Dionysian patterns, in his work The Birth

of Tragedy19

. Nietzsche skilfully notes this

bipolar character of expression, a latent

tension between optimism and pessimism:

"Great art of all times was born of the

interpenetration of two opposing forces, of

an orgiastic impulse and of a visionary state (…)". These impulses are parallel to the

heuristic and mimetic foundations that the author contrasts: "(…) These two impulsive

instincts exist side by side most of the time in open warfare, challenging and arousing each

other to give rise to new creations(…)"20

. But the Dionysian character of "making" possesses

precisely that condition of being impermeable to any technological or scientific revolutions,

as is patent in Mannerism's freeing itself from patterns, harmonies, rules and canons. When

chaos or fatigue of the exacerbated order set in, a dithyrambic frenzy takes iconopoetic and

morphological control, instigating a return to the primitive, unpredictable and imperfect

forms found in nature. The artist of the Cinqueccento was to react against the diagrammatic

reconfiguration of man - patent in Piero della Francesca's De prospectiva Pingendi, Dürer's

Underweissung der Messung and Luca Pacioli's De divina Proportione - with mannerisms,

spiralling dithyrambics, and the exacerbation of pleasure and suffering. It is from this mythic

11 - Raphael. 1516 – 1520. The Transfiguration. Pinacoteca

Vaticana. Vatican City.

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forge that artists such as

Michelangelo, Pontormo and Rosso

Fiorentino were to exercise a

concerted revolution against the

foundations of an emerging mathesis

universalis. We can, however,

question why Mannerist art did not

continue, shifting with the

dithyrambic urges of the human spirit,

prefiguring a utopian freedom

transposed to Iconopoiesis? This

realisation was to formalise what

Nietzsche advocated as being a

reflection of a supreme art reflected in

classical tragedy, that is, the fusion of

the Apollonian harmonic spirit with

Dionysian frenzy - the perfect balance

between mimesis and heuresis, between force and expression, in short, the concatenation of a

pure Iconopoiesis. It was the science of optics, with the introduction of the Camera Obscura

into the artist's studio, that was to supplant not only that diagrammatic aspect of reality, that

exegesis of the number and of excessive mathematisation, but also to attenuate the Mannerist

deformation and dithyrambic ecstasy, by resorting to an innovative compositional

mechanism: the projection of reality itself onto the pictorial surface. With this revolution, art

was to adopt entirely a new conceptual status, above all in the instantaneous assessment on

the part of the artist of the intended compositional effects, but also in the freedom of

expression attained. It was thus the optical revolution that was to bring the paradigmatic

induction whose impact was to last into our own times, that is, the conversion of Alberti's

finestra into a projection screen, reconfiguring the pictorial space as a virtual stage,

transforming visual art into dramatic art, and anticipating the contemporary society of

screens. According to Cassirer, this route of a long-desired confluence between painting and

12 - Johannes Vermeer. 1666. The Allegory of Painting.

Kunsthistorisches Museum. Vienna

15

theatre, between staging and the fixing of concepts and images that optics introduced, may

constitute per se a paradigmatic new expressive dimension: "The great painters show us the

forms of exterior things, the great dramatists show us the forms of our interior life. The

dramatic arts open up a new breadth and depth to life»21

. The proximity of art and science

was thus to work towards a gradual and faithful transposition between heuresis and mimesis,

gradually narrowing or enlarging the space between the artist's initial formulation and the

final result embodied in the work. One can safely affirm that the ultimate goal of artists in the

last five centuries has been to minimise as much as possible the frontier that exists between

the heuristic seminal image and its transposition to the sensible and formal plane, which is at

times a faithful reflection of the

artist's exterior world, at times a

complete mirror of his internal

world. From this point of view we

can revolutionise the traditional

division of history into periods --

invariably understood as periods

and Mega periods where style

follows style by syncretic processes

of acculturation - turning it into a

much more productive vision in

which not only innovative scientific

paradigms trigger radical

transformations in the ways of

seeing and representing the world,

but to which the natural and cyclothymic principles of human expression also contribute.

Based on this vast corpus of theory, it is certainly plausible to affirm that it is important to

create a branch of knowledge dedicated exclusively to the study of "the act of making" in art

such as the Iconopoiesis that we propose. As we have observed, is the modus operandi not

omnipresent throughout the vast frieze of history as the only disruptive and cyclothymic form

of artistic expression? Does it not represent the «act of making» in art, the real trump of

13 - Michelangelo Merisi or Amerighi da Caravaggio. 1599 – 1600. The

Calling of Saint Matthew. Contarelli Chapel. San Luigi dei Francesi.

Rome.

16

avant-gardes or atavisms? We firmly believe in the role embodied by Iconopoiesis in the

study and revelation of these rhythms, and that it constitutes an epistemological window of

extraordinary value.

17

QUOTES

1Schopenhauer. Arthur, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2 (EUA: Courier Dover Publications,

1966) p. 192. 2 Didi-Huberman. Georges, L’Image Survivante – Histoire de L’Art et Temps des Fantômes selon Aby

Warburg, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002) 3Wittkower. Margot and Rudolf, Born Under Saturn. (New York: New York Review Books, 2007) p. 42.

4Heidegger, Martin, The Origin of the Work of Art, (Poetry, language, thought 72, 1971) p. 41

5 Idem. p. 48.

6 Cassirer. Ernst, Symbol, Myth and Culture: Essays and Lectures 1935-1945, (New Haven: Yale University

Press, 1979) p. 21. 7 Venturi, Lionello, História da Critica de Arte, (Lisboa: Edições 70, 2007) p. 19.

8 Eco. Umberto, The Limits of Interpretation, (Indiana University Press, 1994)

9 Heidegger, Martin, The Origin of the Work of Art, (Poetry, language, thought 72, 1971) p. 24

10 Ibidem.

11 Idem. p. 11.

12 Cassirer. Ernst, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953)

13 Panofsky. Erwin, Perspective as symbolic form, (New York: Zone books, 1991)

14 Argan. Giulio Carlo, Arte e Crítica de Arte, (Lisboa: Editorial Estampa 1988) p. 96.

15 Kuhn. Thomas S, The structure of scientific revolutions. (University of Chicago press, 2012) p. 160

16 Heidegger. Martin, Letter on humanism. (1977)

17 Cassirer. Ernst, An essay on man: An Introduction to a philosophy of human culture, (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1992) 18

Idem. 19

Nietzsche. Friedrich, The birth of tragedy, (Courier Dover Publications, 2012) 20

Idem. 21

Cassirer. Ernst, An essay on man: An Introduction to a philosophy of human culture, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)