Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895–1973), in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), recount the human misfortune along the path of systematic thought, from Homeric times through the rise of the mercantile bourgeoisie and into industrial modernity. Citing as emblematic figures such as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)—whom they characterize as “relentless executors of Enlightenment” (ADORNO, 2014, p. 13)—the sociologists of the Frankfurt School denounce the barbarism that resulted from the unrestrained pursuit of mastery over nature through reason, which, when raised to its highest potency, steered Western civilization toward totalitarianism and mass slaughter.

It thus fell to the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1996) to undertake the difficult task of thinking an ethics after Auschwitz (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 15). Guided by the problem of alterity, Lévinas retraced the entire itinerary of Western philosophical thought, concluding that the “interpellation of being relegated ethics to the background, for the gaze upon the Other is reduced, within ontology, to merely one of the stages of philosophical inquiry—more concerned with the discovery of the essence of being in itself than with the being of the Other” (BERNARDES, 2012, pp. 94–95). What emerges, in this case, is a reason turned inward upon itself, whether under the methodological paradigm of antiquity or of modernity.

Lévinas argues that this “primacy of ontology” represents, from a phenomenological perspective, nothing less than a forgetting of the relation that precedes the very inquiry into being. He concludes that such ontological knowledge, having forgotten to be astonished by relation before anything else, will always remain naïve, regardless of the epistemological method applied (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 21).

Marking this difference from his predecessors constitutes Lévinas’s first step toward the “rediscovery of a philosophy whose point of departure is ethics rather than ontology, valuing the truth that emerges from the human relation to the Other” (BERNARDES, 2012, pp. 83–84). In this way, he works to “construct ethics as first philosophy, grounded on the absolute relation of alterity” (PIVATTO apud LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 13). Within the Levinasian ethical–philosophical project, thought rediscovers the phenomenal relation, and we arrive, finally, at “another project of intelligibility and another way of loving wisdom” (PIVATTO apud LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 17). This new way of loving wisdom is grounded in the ethics of alterity.

In light of the above, we propose the following problem as an exercise in reflection: what would result if we were to think the historiography of art from the philosophical perspective of Levinasian phenomenology? If we were to pursue the trace of alterity in Art History, to what destination would we arrive? Applying his philosophical concepts, which historiographies would most closely approximate an effective ethical approach? We shall attempt to address these questions in the paragraphs that follow.

To begin, it is worth recalling Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE). To analyze him from the perspective of alterity, one must consider the political–pedagogical dimension of his Encyclopedia. In this sense, the Herculean task of compiling hundreds of sources from Antiquity appears as an effort to defend Roman society from “decadence,” understood as the consequence of the “increasing penetration of foreign customs into Rome” (TEIXEIRA, 2012, p. 21).

Despite the praise bestowed upon the artists of classical Greece in the final books of the Natural History, the Hellenes contemporary to Pliny—who were increasingly drawn toward the center of the Empire—were identified as “the origin of vice and luxury in Rome” (TEIXEIRA, 2012, p. 38). Culturally speaking, one of the most salient aspects of this artistic dispute was embodied in the dignitas romana—that is, in the frank realism of figures; the austerity in the use of materials; the publicity of works placed in the service of the State, and so forth—in contrast to Greek luxuria, with its idealist naturalism; its ostentatious use of precious materials; and its orientation toward private collectors for enjoyment in secluded spaces. These brief examples confirm that “foreign” culture, from Pliny’s perspective, represented a threat of artistic, political, and moral subversion, one to be countered through the recovery of ancient Roman values, as cultivated by their ancestors.

Beyond this conflict within Roman civilization itself, the “inventory of the world” also includes a defense of imperial domination over “barbarian” or “uncivilized” peoples. The Romanization of subject peoples—conceived as a vocation for the promotion of humanitas—was justified through an ethnocentric lens that classified others as “rustic, uncivilized, and disorderly” (TEIXEIRA, 2012, p. 23). In this expansionist movement of the self, the sculptural, pictorial, and architectural arts played a primary role: that of promoting the cultural domination of the empire. In Levinasian terms, this attitude perhaps best exemplifies the relation of alterity historically constructed toward the Other: that of attempting to reduce the Other to the Same. In stark contrast, Lévinas contends that “the Other, in alterity, is a face that presents itself before the I, in a face-to-face relation, and that demands from the I an ethical comportment that allows it to be—that is, to exist otherwise” (BERNARDES, 2012, p. 87).

A similar stance may be observed in the historiography of Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). While he strove to preserve the memory of “many architects, sculptors, and painters, both ancient and modern, in different regions of Italy” (VASARI, 2011, p. 5)—since they “are being forgotten and are disappearing little by little, in a way that, to speak truly, cannot be judged as anything other than a kind of death very near at hand” (VASARI, 2011, p. 5)—and thus felt an urgent need to “defend them as much as possible from this second death and preserve them for the longest time in the memory of the living” (VASARI, 2011, p. 5), the Aretine historian nonetheless did not refrain from consigning to the veracious mouth of Cronos (sic) the names of those artists who had preceded him. In comparison with Pliny, the relation of alterity that the historian established with the Other is less one of confrontation and domination than of disdain and erasure. This disregard is of such magnitude that Vasari goes so far as to abstract the Other entirely, declaring its death.

According to Vasari, the death of art stemmed from the barbarian invasion of the Roman Empire, yet it was reborn at the hands of artists such as Cimabue (1240–1302) and Giotto (1267–1337), reinforcing the idea that the arts underwent cyclical periods of “perfection [antiquity], decadence [the Middle Ages], and restoration—or rather, rebirth” (VASARI, 2011, p. 71). It is on the basis of this logic that an entire secular culture was concealed and consigned to oblivion.

When we turn to Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), we recall a man who, in his lifetime, fought “battles waged around a kind of idea fija for which he was willing to sacrifice everything” (UHLIG apud WINCKELMANN, 1987, p. 5). This Winckelmannian fanaticism, described by Denis Diderot (1713–1784), led the German historian toward an unrestrained admiration for the ancients at the expense of an excessive disdain for the moderns—“Such is Winckelmann when he confronts the productions of ancient artists with those of the moderns” (UHLIG apud WINCKELMANN, 1987, p. 5).

Winckelmann’s estrangement from his own time drove him nostalgically toward a lost Greece, to the point of elevating it as a stylistic canon—embodied in the formula of serene grandeur and noble simplicity—leaving to the artists of his age the task of imitating the Hellenes of the classical era.

Unlike Pliny, who identified in the funerary masks of his ancestors the most accomplished example of great art; and unlike Vasari, who was enthralled by the technical discoveries undertaken by the artists of his time; Winckelmann established a relation of alterity with the Greeks, only to project upon them an ideal of the self. In this case, one cannot speak of an absolute relation of alterity in the Levinasian sense of the term: the Greece to which Winckelmann refers appears as a quixotic chimera. Even the statuary to which he so frequently alludes may be understood as a ladder for the ascent toward the ideal, following the model of Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy. And this ideal of the self was to be achieved according to the formula of imitation, which was carried out by the Neoclassical artists.

When we read Aby Warburg (1866–1929) in the light of Levinasian philosophy, we must consider the rapprochement he envisioned between the discipline of Art History and Anthropology—the “science of alterity.”

In this context, one must recall the influence that the anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) exerted upon the thought of the Hamburg historian. Emmanuel Lévinas, citing the anthropologist in a short essay entitled “Lévy-Bruhl and Contemporary Philosophy,” attributes to him the great merit of having—in Primitive Mentality (1922)—contributed to the history of philosophy by opposing Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), insofar as he demonstrated the existence of phenomenological categories that exceed those formulated by the German thinker. His writings broaden the notion of “categories that [...] purported to condition experience” without taking into account, for example, “magic and miracle” (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 68). “Lévy-Bruhl precisely questions the alleged necessity of these categories for the possibility of experience” (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 68), since there are experiences that disregard the ideas of causality, substance, and reciprocity—such as space and time—which Kant understood as the condition of “every possible object” (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 68).

Along the same lines as Lévy-Bruhl, we may advance the claim that Warburg offers analogous contributions to Art History, for he appreciated human production in all its cultural dimensions, and not merely through those “aestheticizing” categories—so limiting in scope—which prevailed forcefully in Europe thanks to the Vienna School, particularly ennobled by the figure of Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945).

When Lévy-Bruhl reached the definitive conclusion that the philosophical categories postulated by Kant were insufficient to encompass all forms of human cognition, the possibility emerged of other ways of experiencing the world, inaugurating the potentiality of difference and the very possibility of alterity. In short, the Other with whom the anthropologist was confronted in his field research could not be reduced, classified, analyzed, or fitted into preestablished conceptual molds. Returning to Lévinas, he writes conclusively: “The Other is apprehended in and of itself. Thou art thou absolutely. No understanding can encompass it, surpassing the powers of the I or of totality” (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 15). By definition, “the Other is that which cannot be contained, which leads beyond every context and beyond being” (LÉVINAS, 2004, p. 68).

Thus, the totality with which the self relates is irreducible to any theory of truth. “To admit that the I and the Other do not share the same homeland corresponds to recognizing that no system—be it argumentative, ideological, political, or otherwise—can encompass in its totality the I–Other relation” (BERNARDES, 2012, p. 94). In other words, acknowledging difference is the first step in the ethics of alterity.

Turning to the biography of Aby Warburg to exemplify his approach, we observe this relation of alterity established during his journey to North America, more precisely in his encounter with the Pueblo Indians. Setting out eastward, impelled by what Lévinas would call the desire for the absolute, there he confronted the Face—that is, all that does not partake in the concept of the self, the Other par excellence. At this juncture arises the following question: how can one construct knowledge about the Other without this resulting in an epistemological violence? The aestheticizing history of art, with its reductive tendencies, did not seem to be an option, leading Warburg to propose a history of art that is also a history of culture.

Broadly speaking, Cultural Anthropology, which was emerging under the auspices of Franz Boas (1858–1942), underscored the importance of observing the Other according to its own beliefs and customs, suspending individual or cultural judgments. Warburg’s science of culture moves in the same direction, proposing an approach that studies artistic and cultural manifestations according to the principles or criteria of the very social milieu in which they were produced.

By way of analogy, this posture resembles that of Abraham and stands in opposition to that of Odysseus—figures so dear to Lévinas. While the former abandons his native land to wander in the desert, relying on the hospitality of those he encounters, the latter departs Ithaca to wage war and conquer, only to return in the end to the island of himself. Warburg is that Abrahamic trunk who, though transplanted to the West, does not deny his Hebraic root.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by the so-called “masters of suspicion”: first, Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who discerned behind the phenomena of nature the law of natural selection; likewise Friedrich Nietzsche, who suspected the loftiest thoughts and exposed their generative impulses, despite the efforts of others to conceal them through discourse; in the same vein Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), who unveiled the unconscious of human psychology; Karl Marx (1818–1883), who formulated the notion of infrastructure as the prime cause and motor of the social superstructure; and finally, in Anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), who sought a structuralism that “abandons the level of conscious phenomena to privilege the study of their unconscious infrastructure” (DESCOLA, 2009, p. 149).

By a certain force we may also inscribe Warburg among this gallery of suspicious thinkers: at various points in his work he speaks to us of an ontogenetic dimension, characteristics common to both primitives and moderns—psychic structures (passions and phobias), physical needs, symbolic faculties, and so forth. His science of culture, which suspects this supra-historical man, aims to understand how each epoch’s culture grappled with these universal and elemental demands. For if the American primitive coped with his phobias by invoking the forces of nature through magical formulas, or if the European Renaissance man resorted to the power of divination with his astrological science, in both cases there existed a natural need for survival, in which the human psyche operated to create an imaginary illusion of power over the imponderable.

And yet, although Warburg recognized himself in the Other at the ontogenetic level, he did not lose himself in that identity. On the contrary: he knew that, in historical and cultural terms, he stood before an Other, and it is from this relation of alterity that Warburg began to construct his science of culture.

Isaac Arrais

Universidade Federal de São Paulo

01 de setembro de 2025 

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