georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

112 Confronting Imagescome, in the eighteenth century, to mean little more thanpoliteness or civility, it had, for Kant, a much deeper significance.72This ‘‘much deeper significance’’ is none other than the one inwhich humanism undertook to reformulate, beyond the Middle Ages,the very notion of ‘‘humanity.’’ It engaged an ethics and a relation tohistory, but quite as much an aesthetics and a relation to the beyond:art, science, history, metaphysics, all were mutually encompassed anddeduced therein. Panofsky invites us to consider that renascent humanismrecovered with the great thought of antiquity the just measureof the humanity of man. For it confronted humanitas with its beyond(divinitas), and also with its underside (barbaritas): misery and grandeurcoupled. We might say that humanism was born with this ‘‘twofoldaspect’’ (for such was Panofsky’s phrase); we might also say thathumanism articulated a synthesis of dialectical antinomies. 73 Now ifwe transpose this very general point of departure to the level of reflectionabout knowledge, we again encounter the two-fold aspect ofsensible intuition and intellectual work; we encounter, says Panofsky,the two spheres of nature and culture: ‘‘From the humanistic point ofview, however, it became reasonable, and even inevitable, to distinguish,within the realm of creation, between the sphere of nature andthe sphere of culture, and to define the former with reference to thelatter [he might just as well have written: ‘‘to deduce the former fromthe latter’’], i.e., nature as the whole world accessible to the senses,except for the records left by man.’’ 74So we see that the two aspects of knowledge—sensible, conceptual—werereunited in humanism in the guise of an extreme attentionfocused precisely on these ‘‘records left by man’’: it is history thatsynthesizes in the domain of art the ‘‘sensible’’ observation of natureand a constant recourse to the cultural traditions of the past. ‘‘[Thehumanist] is, fundamentally, an historian.’’ 75 What does this mean?First, that history was invented or reinvented in the Renaissance: wethink again of Vasari as of one of its great heroes. Then that humanisteruditio, developing in the element of history, managed to conjugateart with science, the sensible with the intelligible. 76 Finally, that this