Abstract

The paper aims to compare two metaphysical ways to reach the unity of the immediate, i.e. Bergson’s option of overcoming the mediate and Cassirer’s one that instead sees only in it the manifestation of immediacy. Cassirer shows against Bergson that the mediated “space” of meaning is insuperable when it’s interpreted in its symbolic dimension: sign and form are in essential synthesis with meaning and process, in an insurmountable correlation which describes them as inseparable and mutually mediated moments of a universal symbolical dynamics. It’s just the “event” of symbolic, as inner form of reality, that represents the index of an immediate that appears in a different configuration every time. Criticizing the “overcoming” of metaphysics Cassirer aims to cover a “long way” – unlike Bergson’s “short way” – through the symbolic and the multiplicity of its mediated manifestations to come to grasp the symbolic dynamics itself: to remain “faithful” to the immediate means repeating the inaugural gesture of meaning, i.e. to let oneself be guided by the “ethical” imperative of the pure relation that is given only in the “work” by a “doing” that doesn’t betray the dynamics but brings it to its full expression.