This is a book about the pathos of an age, about its epistemic and technological conditions and the imaginary that emerged in their shadow. As I was writing of this book, it increasingly became clear to me that history had shifted a little further, as if it had gotten over what I narrate in these pages. In the last years of the twentieth century, the pathos of the symbolist revolution against the dominance of intuitive thinking and the deep confusion into which, since about the middle of the nineteenth century, intuitive minds had been thrown by knowledge of the symbolic and the completely unintuitive facts of communication seemed to have come to a close. If we still believed that the owl of Minerva waits until dusk to spread her wings, of course, all the conditions for writing a history of the fascination symbolism has exercised would be met. In such moments, and if only for such a moment, everyone is still in good conscience a Hegelian. Symptomatic of our new situation, in any event, is the fact that under the heading “iconic turn” (Mitchell, Boehm), the partisans of intuition, which in the symbolic age was a great but more or less subterraneous current of thought, are the object of renewed attention. Now that images have become symbolic (since they can be generated digitally) and overwhelm us, the question of the originary constitution of iconicity has rightly become a central element of the effort to diagnose how our present conceives of itself. And if we do not want to succumb to the mobilization of the imaginary now employing symbolic means, there may be good reasons to oppose the symbolic imperative, to reexamine the pros and cons of intuition, and to develop intuitive skills anew. At one time, the task was to demolish the sovereignty of intuition over symbolic thought and revise epistemological and ontological foundations under the auspices of the symbolic; now, evidently, the tables have been turned. The very hegemony of digitalness gives rise to resistance because it has begun to subject intuition completely and totalize itself. But why should we, now, especially if we are interested in diagnosing the present situation, why should we be looking at the symbolist pathos and its beauty, at the crisis of intuition since 1850 and its effects on the imaginary rather than work at comprehending the current crisis of intuition?