‘Perhaps this strict professor was madder than he seemed.’
[i]Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari,
What is Philosophy?‘How could truth be for us that last remainder of the utmost disintegration of the Platonic άλήθεια (ίδέα), the legitimacy of correctnesses in themselves as [their] ideal, i.e., the greatest of all instances of indifference and powerlessness?’
[ii]Martin Heidegger,
Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis)IntroductionThe contention of this essay is that Martin Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics and his rethinking of the essential nature of art are inseparable from his critique of the Western metaphysical tradition. We are not here talking about the ‘end’ or ‘death’ of art which is so often, mistakenly in my view, associated with the name Heidegger. In this essay we are going to undertake a thorough examination of Heidegger’s critique of ‘aesthetics’ as an epiphenomenon of ‘metaphysics’
[1] and appraise the ‘non-metaphysical’ alternative he professes to have given us. The essay will therefore be divided into two parts. The first will address the former issue and the second the latter one.
Heidegger writes in plain and unabashed terms in the first section of The Origin of the Work of Art
[2] that ‘aesthetics’ is perennially ‘disposed, in advance to view the artwork…within the dominion of the traditional interpretation of beings in general.’
[iii] As I hope to show, such distortion and violence is intimately bound up with the conceptualization of truth that emerged with the inception of Western metaphysics and has remained in the ascendance, in one form or another ever since. We will examine and refer to texts more or less contemporaneous with OWA from the mid-1930s up to the early 1940s. We will on occasion deviate from this period when deemed necessary, for example, to clarify certain ideas with which Heidegger presumes the reader’s familiarity and thus doesn’t provide a full explication of their meaning and greater significance.
Furthermore, a simplistic Heidegger I and Heidegger II division simply won’t do. There are significant continuities, shifts and breaches in the meaning and significance of a multitude of ideas we find in Heidegger’s oeuvre which can’t be crudely assimilated into a superficial and perfunctory schema engineered in order to make Heidegger more ‘accessible’. I will therefore try my best to keep my analysis within the parameters of about eight years or so. However, even within this space of time, to presume terminological continuity could be very problematic as the years 1936-38 saw an intense upheaval in Heidegger’s thinking in which he conceived his Contributions to Philosophy.
[3] In part due to the vertiginous intricacy of this text, not to mention the complications that its proper introduction would involve, we shall try to keep our references to CP to a minimum. Instead we shall rely predominantly upon Off the Beaten Track, Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures, Introduction to Metaphysics,
[4] and a number of essays from Pathmarks. We will also of course refer to Being and Time,
[5] Heidegger’s magnum opus which although published in 1927 is nonetheless absolutely crucial to understanding Heidegger’s thought, even at its most rudimentary.
Part I
I would like to begin this discussion with two texts in particular: the Nietzsche lecture series entitled The Will to Power as Art (1936-7) and Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (1940).
[6] Although Heidegger would renege on certain ideas presented in these texts in later years, they provide a clear statement of his views on key issues that we intend to address in the course of our discussion. These texts should also make more readily apparent the positions which Heidegger is ‘opposing’ or attempting to surpass in his rethinking of the work of art in his seminal essay OWA. Hopefully by the end of this first part of the essay, Heidegger’s reasons for posing the questions he does in OWA and the motivations behind his deployment of certain ideas there, should be far more intelligible. In one of his lectures from the WPA Heidegger provides us with a cursory sketch of the history of aesthetics. He traces a genealogy of this term from its beginnings in Greek thought up to and including its culmination in Nietzsche’s philosophy of art. He begins by telling us that the word ‘aesthetics’ is formed in the same way as both ‘logic’ and ‘ethics’. In all three instances the word epistēmē, knowledge, follows and completes the relevant term.
[iv] Thus aisthētikē epistēmē, is knowledge of human behaviour vis-à-vis sense, sensation, and feeling, and a knowledge of how these are determined. The beautiful determines feeling and what feeling comports itself toward.
[v] Heidegger delineates six basic developments in the history of aesthetics. In this part of the essay we will examine and assess each stage of development in some detail.
According to Heidegger the Presocratics had no need of ‘aesthetics’. He claims ‘they had such an originally mature and luminous knowledge, such a passion for knowledge, that in their luminous state of knowing they had no need of “aesthetics.”’
[vi] For the early Greeks a thing’s beauty was a function of its truth-character. This consisted in its ability to let ‘truth’ shine forth in its very appearance.
[vii] The arts thus disclosed a world steeped in meaning and profundity, and so were able to render in an immediate fashion, the presence of the divine, humanity’s destiny and its dialogue with the gods.
[viii] The arts possessed a power, unparalleled in any other time, to disclose a world, and thus bestow upon human beings, gods and things their proper place.
[ix] Art had the power to gather and hold things together (legein). Although today this role is fulfilled by technology and its techno-scientific Weltanschauung, art was greatly esteemed by the Presocratics because of its special kinship with, and revealing of, the essence of truth. Art’s logos sustained by a poiesis or poetic power entirely distinct from its technological successor, despite their common origin in technē, ensured that the power of revealing was presented in the artwork.
[x] In his important essay Building Dwelling Thinking
[7] (1951) Heidegger would describe this gathering potential of ‘the thing’ in terms of das Geviert or the fourfold, which stands as the concrescence of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities.
[xi] The work of art opened up a ‘site’ through which human beings could find their place in and through their relation to the gods, earth and sky; the power of art for the early Greeks did not as it would in later times reside in the mere feeling of aesthetic pleasure.
[xii] It is unfortunate that a thorough examination of the fourfold is beyond the scope of this essay. It is nevertheless useful to see, if only in a prefatory way that the Presocratic’s relation to art would continue to greatly influence the manner and style of Heidegger’s thinking into the 1950s and beyond. It is perhaps the only period in which human Da-sein’s relationship to art is not regarded by Heidegger as merely epiphenomenal or reducible to developments in metaphysical thought.
In this particular lecture the Presocratic relationship to art isn’t really elaborated upon and is, even if one wishes to be generous, only predicated on mere assertion. It is such instances that have led not only his critics but even some of his most generous interpreters to concede that Heidegger sentimentalizes the Presocratics. However, I don’t believe such a view is warranted, not only because it would be churlish to judge Heidegger so harshly on the basis of merely a cursory outline, but also because ultimately it’s irrelevant to his more pressing concerns i.e. the impairment of human Da-sein’s comportment toward the work of art and the latter’s relation to truth. In the end, Heidegger is seeking to counter modern ‘aesthetics’ impoverished and retrograde attitude towards art, irrespective of whether there was ever a time when art and truth were indistinguishable in their unity. In numerous essays Heidegger opines that the so-called ‘first beginning’ is never destined to return, and freely voices doubts as to it ever having existed at all. Heidegger will seek to provide us with a countermovement to this history of degeneration and decay in OWA.
Heidegger tells us that ‘aesthetics’ begins properly with the Greeks only when decline and decadence has already firmly established itself, and the ‘great art’ and ‘great philosophy’ definitive of the era preceding the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, have vanished from the horizon. It is at this point whereby ‘those basic concepts are formed which mark off the boundaries for all future inquiry into art.’
[xiii] Perhaps the most important conceptual distinction for the future of aesthetics is between hylē and morphē, matter and form. The materiality of the thing is that which gives it constancy and pith. Form is posited simultaneously with the conception of the thing as matter.
[xiv] The thing’s perdurance and constancy depend upon matter and form remaining together.
[xv] ‘This interpretation of the thing invokes the immediate sight with which the thing concerns us through its appearance (είδος).’
[xvi] Plato conceived beings with regard to their outer appearance, which he termed eidos or idea. The idea is the visible form that offers a view of what is present.
[xvii] ‘Where beings are apprehended as beings, and distinguished from other beings, in view of their outer appearance, the demarcation and arrangement of beings in terms of outer and inner limits enters on the scene. But what limits is form, what is limited is matter.’
[xviii] The conceptual scheme of matter and form has been and continues to be used in a vast number of ways by aesthetics and has had inestimable repercussions for disciplines completely unrelated to aesthetics as such.
[xix]For Plato the proper essence of being consisted in what would be called by the Romans quidditas, or whatness. The doctrine that a thing’s essence exemplifies most fully what it is. From thereon out our apprehension becomes essentially tied to the idea. That which is ‘unconcealed’ is now taken as what is accessible due to the self-showing or shining forth of the idea.
[xx] Within The Republic’s ‘allegory of the cave’ according to Heidegger we observe a transformation in the essence of truth from alētheia to correspondence: ‘henceforth the essence of truth does not, as the essence of unhiddenness, unfold from its proper and essential fullness but rather shifts to the essence of the ίδέα. The essence of truth gives up its fundamental trait of unhiddenness.’
[xxi] With the Platonic revolution in philosophy the act of knowing must be agreement with the thing itself in order for ‘truth’ to obtain. ‘In so directing itself, apprehending conforms itself to what is to be seen: the ‘visible form’ of the being. What results from this conforming of apprehension, as an ίδεϊυ, to the ίδέα is a όμοίωσις, an agreement of the act of knowing with the thing itself. Thus, the priority of ίδέα and ίδεϊυ over άλήθεια results in a transformation in the essence of truth. Truth becomes όρθότης, the correctness of apprehending and asserting.’
[xxii] Whatever ‘comes into view as soon as the work of art is experienced as a self-showing according to its eidos, as phainesthai, is now subsumed under these definitions. The ekphanestaton, what properly shows itself and is most radiant of all, is the beautiful. By way of the idea, the work of art comes to appear in the designation of the beautiful as ekphanestaton.’
[xxiii]The introduction of the matter-form distinction was founded upon the Platonic interpretation of beings as eidos. Heidegger contends in PDT that the ‘allegory of the cave’ contains an epoch-defining transmutation of the essence of truth, and therfore in the interpretation of beings as a whole. It is the ‘unspoken event’ of the ‘allegory of the cave’ in which the idea elides and covers over the interpretation of beings as alētheia, which Heidegger somewhat idiosyncratically translates as Unverborgenheit, or ‘unconcealment.’ Prior to the transformation of its sense by Plato, Heidegger claims alētheia denoted the fundamental trait of the essence of truth.
[xxiv]A second concept, technē, accompanies the matter-form distinction, which will have immeasurable repercussions for our thinking about art. Heidegger claims that technē for the Presocratics signified a kind of revealing that laid bare the radiance of truth itself. The beautiful was regarded by them as an exemplary instance of the shining forth of truth. However, with the domination of the interpretation of beings as idea in tandem with the distinction between matter and form (which is itself ultimately derivative of the former event), the essence of technē is propelled in another direction and consequently stripped of the broader significance it had previously enjoyed.
This broader meaning signified human beings striving to gain a foothold and establish themselves amongst phusis, which Heidegger takes, following his Greek predecessors, to denote the essential name for beings as a whole.
[xxv] Or as Heidegger puts it in his Introduction to Metaphysics, phusis ‘emerges from itself (for example, the emergence, the blossoming, of a rose), the unfolding that opens itself up, the coming-into-appearance in such unfolding, and holding itself up and persisting in appearance…Phusis as emergence can be experienced everywhere…Phusis is Being itself, by virtue of which beings first become and remain observable.’
[xxvi] As thought by the Presocratics phusis is the most general trait that encompasses and penetrates all reality. It is the first ‘metaphysical’ name of the being of beings and marks the beginning of ‘onto-theology’, which tries it utmost to define the eternal nature of things as a separate force, an isolable substance, and a cause of all particular things.
[xxvii]Technē is knowledge expediting human beings mastery of beings. The kind of knowledge that guides mastery over beings in which other beings are produced in addition to, and on the basis of beings, that have already come to be (phusis) i.e. the kind of knowledge that produces utensils and works of art, is specifically designated with the word technē.
[xxviii] It ‘always means knowledge, the disclosing of beings as such, in the knowing guidance of bringing forth.’
[xxix] Technē divested of its wider significance becomes, in Aristotle for example, merely one mode of knowing amongst others. To the extent that technē is expressly affiliated with the production and representation of beautiful things, it is diverted via the beautiful into the domain of aesthetics.
[xxx]The essay will address Heidegger’s re-appropriation of alētheia in further detail below. It should suffice for the moment to say firstly that Heidegger, in this essay, as well as in a number of other essays and lectures, believes that an event of immense significance has taken place with Platonic philosophy’s transformation of the essence of truth; an event that runs throughout the history of Western philosophy culminating in Nietzsche’s theory of truth as a kind of error.
[xxxi] Heidegger many years later would renege on this thesis in his essay The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking
[8] written in the late 1960s.
[xxxii] In time he came to think this thesis unsound and that Western philosophy had always to some extent held that ‘truth’ was a matter of correspondence between thought and the thing itself. Eventually he would cease referring to alētheia as simply a manifestation of truth altogether, because of the manifold connotations inevitably evoked with its use.
Secondly, Heidegger’s own thinking of alētheia in no way seeks to recapture or is dependent upon an ‘authentic’ definition of alētheia by the historical Presocratics, even though he undoubtedly drew great inspiration from their thinking. Even in PDT, the essay in which he most explicitly advocates the thesis of a transformation in the essence of truth from within Plato’s philosophy, he is very cautious in attributing anything directly to Plato. More modestly he suggests that Plato’s own doctrine of truth is ambiguous and equivocal but also that he i.e. Heidegger, is thinking something that remains ‘unthought’ by Plato.
[9] In suggesting this, Heidegger isn’t implying superciliously that he has somehow espied something to which Plato was oblivious or didn’t have the requisite intelligence to properly explicate. Heidegger sees his own ‘method’ of reading instead as he writes so eloquently in What is Called Thinking?:
[10] ‘there are only two possibilities: either to go to their encounter, or to go counter to them.’
[xxxiii]Heidegger brings to his encounter with Plato a specific question: the question of the meaning of the being of beings. This of course is what most often irks unsympathetic readers of Heidegger. All nuance, subtlety and flare are reduced to the common denominator of the platitudinous non-problem of the meaning of the being of beings. I hope to show, Heidegger’s own meditation upon the nature of unconcealment in the OWA is wholly his own creation and furthermore makes a profound contribution toward his attempt to evade the grasp of metaphysical prejudice endemic to philosophy’s relationship to art. There is no attempt on Heidegger’s part to re-present an ‘unblemished’ or ‘purer’ cast of thought, by dint of a re-enactment or effort to ‘once again’ realize the ‘golden age’ of the early Greeks.
The third phase of the history of aesthetics is one ‘that involves our entire history’ and inaugurates the beginning of modernity. Now human beings and their own self-knowledge delimit and shape how beings are defined and experienced.
[xxxiv] What best exemplifies this development is of course the Cartesian epiphany through which the certitude of being and all truth are held to reside within the self-conscious ego. With Descartes, the idea becomes perceptio and the whole of being becomes that which can be represented as an object of representation.
[xxxv] The thinking subject or cogito is now the cause of the whole of being, not as efficient cause, but as the condition of possibility for its representation.
[xxxvi] Meditation on the beauty of art becomes expressly linked to human beings’ subjective feeling, aisthēsis.
[xxxvii] This third phase includes not only the Cartesian revolution but also and perhaps even more importantly the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant. I would now like to turn to Kant’s aesthetics in order to demonstrate the pertinence of Heidegger’s thesis regarding the third phase in the development of aesthetics. In the following consideration of Kant’s aesthetics we do not claim to give a full or comprehensive exposition of Kant’s analytic of the beautiful. We merely wish to demonstrate that evidence can be found for Heidegger’s broader thesis a propos what he takes to be the third stage of the history of Western aesthetics. This to reiterate, is the thesis that knowledge of art and the adjudication of the beautiful falls to human cognition and is assessed first and foremost in accordance with the ‘feeling’ elicited from the subject’s cognizance of a work of art. Moreover, due to the pre-eminence assigned to the self-conscious subject by Cartesian philosophy, which Kant’s theoretical philosophy whole-heartedly adopted in the guise of the transcendental unity of apperception, the subject-object relation would envelope all future aesthetic considerations.
The artwork posited as an ‘object’ for a ‘subject’ in a relation of feeling or conceptualized in terms of ‘lived experience’ emerges as the norm for the scrutiny of artistic works. Art has already in a sense renounced its former capacity to let truth shine forth as it had for the early Greeks. Albeit there is perhaps still a glimmer or residuum of art’s early glory in Kant’s analytic of the sublime, an issue that we will unfortunately not be able to look at here. Instead we shall examine Kant’s theory of reflective judgment and the analytic of the beautiful as presented in the Third Critique, because it best demonstrates the main features of the third phase of the history of aesthetics, which Heidegger describes for us. These are to repeat, the pre-eminence of the subject-object relation and the relation of feeling which binds the two together, facilitating aesthetic appreciation.
For Kant an aesthetic judgement’s determining ground lies in sensation connected with the feeling of pleasure or displeasure.
[xxxviii] Kant’s problematic in the Critique of the Power of Judgement is to determine the conditions under which an aesthetic judgement of reflection is possible. It is occasioned through a series of attendant processes. The first step is the imagination’s apprehension of the manifold of intuition of a given object. The concurrence of the apprehended intuition with the presentation of a concept of the understanding, even though the concept remains undetermined, eventuates in reflection mutual agreement between the understanding and the imagination ‘for the advancement of their business’.
[xxxix] In this process no determinate concept of the object is required or generated, and this is why Kant regards an aesthetic judgement of reflection as non-cognitive. In other words, the imagination, under the general guidance of the understanding, provides an apprehended content that presents itself as containing ‘something universal in itself,’ that is, something that appears as if it were the schema or exhibition of an ‘as yet undetermined concept,’ albeit no conception in particular.
[xl] In this state, which corresponds with the norm required for cognition without itself amounting to cognition, the understanding is invigorated and spurred on to grasp the rule that seems to underlie this apprehended content.
[xli] This in turn triggers the imagination to present this apprehended content as fully as possible.
[xlii]I will now attempt to flesh out this abstract construction in more concrete terms. This will allow us to see more clearly the relationship between the human subject and the work of art, which Heidegger argues to be characteristic of the third development in the history of aesthetics. For example, if I watch David Lynch’s film Lost Highway, my cognitive faculties are set into a free play by the representations before me.
[xliii] This is because there is no determinate concept which restricts them to any particular rule of cognition. Thus while the imagination apprehends the manifold of intuition, the understanding, during my viewing, strives for the unity of the concept that will unify these representations.
[xliv] As Henry Allison observes, the relationship between the two faculties is not without a certain tension because of the fact that they pull in opposite directions: the understanding toward universality and the imagination toward specificity.
[xlv] Nevertheless, this ‘free play’ of my cognitive faculties produces an ideal attunement or ‘optimal’ inner relationship between them, and this in turn gives me a feeling of pleasure while watching the film.
[xlvi]An aesthetic judgement of reflection is a subjective judging of an object, in this instance Lynch’s Lost Highway. For Kant my aesthetic judgement of the film precedes my pleasure of it.
[xlvii] The very act of aesthetic judgement is for Kant, the ground of the pleasure I derive from watching the film.
[xlviii] Thus, the pleasure that I accrue through watching this film is not strictly from the film itself. It emanates from the reciprocal free play of my cognitive faculties produced by the film in the act of aesthetic judgement itself. The free harmony is itself subjectively purposive, because it enlivens the cognitive faculties involved therein; pleasure is precisely the sensation through which the subject becomes aware of this heightened activity.
[xlix]From this brief foray into Kant’s aesthetics we can see that the broad strokes of Heidegger’s conclusions are fairly accurate. The nature of the beautiful becomes in the wake of Kant’s determination of the a priori principles governing the faculty of judgement, inseparable from the subject’s own apperception of the optimal reciprocal free play of his or her cognitive faculties. This in turn provides the subject with a feeling of pleasure that is indissociable from his or her apperception of this very process. Heidegger concludes that aesthetics ‘is to be in the field of sensuousness and feeling precisely what logic is in the area of thinking – which is why it is also called “logic of sensuousness.”’
[l]4. The fourth development in the history of aesthetics spells the demise once and for all of ‘great art.’ This means for Heidegger, whom takes his cue from Hegel in this instance, that art has forfeited its fundamental task in which it endeavours to represent the Absolute. ‘The achievement of aesthetics derives its greatness from the fact that it recognizes and gives utterance to the end of great art as such. The final and greatest aesthetics in the Western tradition is that of Hegel.’
[li] This being said, Heidegger places Hegel squarely within the trajectory previously established by Plato, and is accused of perpetuating the Platonic conception of art as the imitation of truth.
[lii] With Hegel art becomes the sensuous incarnation of the Idea and so, in the final analysis, remains inadequate to truth. The inadequacy exists between sensuous form and its ideal content.
[liii] Only philosophy can partake in the full and uncompromised self-presentation of truth in which form and content properly coincide.
[liv]5. The nineteenth century, conscious of its own decline, strove to once again realize the ‘collective artwork.’ Heidegger considers Richard Wagner as the most renowned artist of this fifth phase. He then proceeds to adumbrate the basic tenets of the Wagnerian aesthetic. Wagner held that the arts should no longer be realized individually but should converge and coexist in a single work.
[lv] Moreover, the artwork should be a celebration of the national community and be sanctified as the religion of the collective. What is most desired is ‘the domination of art as music, and thereby the domination of the pure state of feeling – the tumult and delirium of the senses…the frenzy and the disintegration into sheer feeling as redemptive. The “lived experience” as such becomes decisive. The work is merely what arouses such experience.’
[lvi]One could maybe speculate that rather than its reversal, Wagner’s aesthetic takes Kant’s meditation on beauty to its logical conclusion. The faculty of judgement has been divested of its governing a priori principles and given way to ‘the conception and estimation of art in terms of the unalloyed state of feeling and the growing barbarization of the very state to the point where it becomes the sheer bubbling and boiling of feeling abandoned to itself.’
[lvii] Wagner hoped that his vision would be able to act as a bulwark or even challenger to the malaise rife throughout Europe, the ineluctable destruction of the sacred, the death of the holy and the contagious homelessness pervading modern humanity’s existence.
[11] His former friend and disciple, Friedrich Nietzsche quickly abandoned such a hope, and saw with great prescience that ‘aesthetics’ had already been irrevocably relegated to a sterile and bromide academic discipline, which could only recall its former majesty through a pathetic and saccharine nostalgia.
6. It is Nietzsche who is the first to recognize and resolutely proclaim the dawn of the nihilistic age. Although there had of course been rumblings of nihilism before, it is only with Nietzsche, according to Heidegger, that the event of the death of God is fully thought out with the utmost rigor and clarity. I will now undertake a brief overview of specific issues related in Heidegger’s essay Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead (1943).
[12] By doing so I hope to lend further credence to the contention that the history of aesthetics for Heidegger is virtually epiphenomenal to the history of Western metaphysics. The epiphenomenal status of art as seen through the eye of aesthetic discourse is exacerbated precipitously with each development in the history of Western aesthetics. It is with Nietzsche, according to Heidegger, that it reaches its zenith.
In NW Heidegger declares that the essence and event of nihilism emanates from metaphysics itself.
[lviii] The word ‘metaphysics’ denotes not merely an established university curriculum but the ‘fundamental structure of beings in their entirety…differentiated into a sensory and a supersensory world,’ in which the former is supported and determined by the latter.
[lix] Nietzsche discerned that the essence of nihilism was the process whereby the hitherto most sacred and exalted values devalue themselves. This process culminates with Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God and sparks his effort to initiate Platonism’s inversion. In the end, Nietzsche would cast aside supersensuousness altogether in a short section of Twilight of the Idols entitled How the ‘Real World’ at last Became a Myth, which seeks to rescue the sensuous world from its former degradation. With this gesture, the sensuous world ceases to be regarded as merely ‘apparent’, and Platonism’s hegemony is seemingly deracinated.
[lx] Despite this admirable effort to break free and overcome the tyranny of the supersensuous, Nietzsche Heidegger believes, offers us only a reversal of Platonism. Rather than leaving metaphysics behind once and for all, Heidegger proclaims with a large serving of bombast that Nietzsche instead emerges as ‘the most unrestrained Platonist in the history of Western metaphysics.’
[lxi]Heidegger contends that Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism and his concomitant desire to grant supremacy to art in lieu of truth bespeak of a more baleful development in the history of metaphysics and consequently aesthetics. Nietzsche’s statement that ‘Art is worth more than truth’ determines ‘value’ as the pre-eminent criterion of aesthetic judgement.
[lxii] This transformation is grounded by Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power.
[lxiii] It is the will to power that performs the dispensation of value in accordance with life affirming and life denying forces.
The value of art is derivative of its capacity to affirm life.
[13] Nietzsche polemized against the primacy of the spectator in Kantian aesthetics, but himself missed something far more troubling. This is the continued reliance upon the affective and vital states of the subject, as both spectator and creator. As strange as this may seem to a seasoned reader of Nietzsche, he is interpreted by Heidegger as in fact securing the fundaments of Cartesian subjectivity in a way that Descartes never could. ‘The state of feeling is to be traced back to excitations of the nervous system, to bodily conditions…aesthetics as applied physiology.’
[lxiv]It is in this way that Nietzsche’s thought marks the completion of philosophy as anthropology and the victory of Wertphilosophie. Philosophy has been enervated and deprived of its force. Its self-conception amounts to little more than Weltanschauung and ideology.
[lxv] This includes for Heidegger, Nietzsche’s plan for a ‘revaluation of all values hitherto,’ which is itself merely the by-product rather than the solution to a rabid and intractable nihilism. Contrary to what Nietzsche had hoped, his aesthetics is powerless to act as a countermovement to nihilism’s onslaught.
Part IIHaving considered in some detail Heidegger’s account of the history of aesthetics we can finally turn our attention to OWA. The lecture consists of three substantial parts. Part one discusses the thing-like character of the work of art. In part two Heidegger elaborates his re-thinking of the essence of truth by examining the ‘strife’ between what he calls ‘earth’ and ‘world’. This originary strife which coincides with the ‘setting-to-work of truth’ (das Sich-ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit) is taken by Heidegger to be constitutive of the work of art’s ontological structure. In part three Heidegger delves deeper into the problematic relationship between art and truth, expanding upon certain themes and tropes alluded to earlier in the lecture, and introducing others, such as the ‘figure,’ the ‘rift,’ and the artwork’s relation to history. In this part of the essay I will concentrate predominantly upon parts two and three. I will briefly consider some of the thoughts presented in part one germane to our discussion thus far.
Heidegger’s question at the outset of this essay is in a sense quasi-transcendental. He wishes to provide us with a provisional answer to the question: how is art possible at all? This will entail the uncovering of the artwork’s Ursprung or ‘origin’ which in turn will allow us to espy its essential nature and thus the very ‘how’ of its possibility. Heidegger’s first step toward answering this question is to probe into the thingly character of the work of art. He enumerates three ways in which the thingly character of the thing has been interpreted. First, the thing as a bearer of properties; second, the thing as the unity of a sensory manifold, and third, as ‘matter’ to which ‘form’ has been imparted.
[lxvi] Heidegger regards each as the by-product of an ontological prejudice. Above we have already examined hylomorphism’s indebtedness to the legacy of Platonism.
Philosopher and former student of Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer tells us that Heidegger’s exposition of the thingly character of the artwork is in part a rebuttal of the influential Neo-Kantian School. The conceptual framework which guided the Neo-Kantians’ investigations into the nature of aesthetic reflection, was the conjunction of the thingly and the supra-thingly, unified within the artwork. Heidegger argues that the description of the work of art in this manner implicitly operates on an ontological model that gives primacy to scientific cognition above all else. This model holds that that which really ‘is’ is thing-like in character and circumscribed within the bounds of sensible intuition. The thing-like character of the thing acts as the bedrock of the natural sciences’ overriding desire to achieve purely objective cognition.
[lxvii] In aesthetics this prejudice manifests itself through the supposition that the thing-like character of the artwork functions as a substructure upon which the genuine aesthetic form arises as a kind of superstructure.
[lxviii] Although Heidegger’s criticisms are directed in particular at Neo-Kantians such as Nicolai Hartmann, this all-pervasive variation of the matter-form distinction is only the most recent ‘assault on the thing’ to have surfaced in a long history of misconstrual and misunderstanding.
I would now like to review in some detail the second and third parts of the OWA. But in order to do so we must first conclude our discussion of the thingly character of the thing, so crucial in setting the stage for the ideas worked out later in the essay. It is in the last pages of this first part of the essay that Heidegger introduces his controversial interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of what seems to be a pair of peasant shoes.
[14] It at this point that a crucial transition takes place: Heidegger moves from a discussion of the nature of the equipmentality of equipment to the work of art’s capacity to open up and unfold a world. It is through the work-character of the artwork that the essence of the shoes is conveyed. Heidegger avers that within Van Gogh’s painting we discover ‘what the shoes, in truth, are.’
[lxix] Through the artwork a disclosure of the essential nature of the peasant shoes takes place. Their essence manifests itself through the painting in which the work of art’s work-character (Werksein) initiates the truth of the equipmental being of the shoes setting-itself-to-work. Thus the ‘origin’ of the work of art is to be found in the very operation of the work qua work and not in its ability to mimic or represent truth in a sensuous form. This is Heidegger’s re-inscription of alētheia into the Ursprung of the work of art at the ‘end’ of aesthetics and the ‘closure’ of metaphysics. It is through the painting that the equipmental being of the pair of peasant shoes is most fully divulged and explicitly appears. To ‘set’ for Heidegger means ‘to bring to a stand’; it is in unconcealment that the being of the peasant shoes stands in the ‘light of its being’.
[lxx] In this regard, Heidegger refers to the self-repose of the work, its Insichstehen, or Insichruhen.
[lxxi] This self-repose also involves a withdrawal from the artist, or rather a self-withdrawal of the artist, whose proper intention is to release the work and to let it stand forth as a work.
[lxxii]The artwork sparks an event of truth. ‘The shining that is set into the work is the beautiful. Beauty is one way in which truth as unconcealment comes to presence.’
[lxxiii] This is the reason why Heidegger, at least in OWA, is largely indifferent to the person of the artist and the artist as creator. For Heidegger these are ultimately dogmas inculcated by the aesthetic tradition, which we have come to take for granted. He writes that precisely ‘in great art (which is all we are concerned with here) the artist remains something inconsequential in comparison with the work – almost like a passageway which, in the creative process, destroys itself for the sake of the coming forth of the work.’
[lxxiv] Creation, for Heidegger, is always thought with reference to the work.
[lxxv]This will seem counter-intuitive to many of us. Doesn’t such a view occlude the specific concerns of the artist, for example, aesthetic, political, social or erotic, and thereby demote the artwork into generic indeterminacy? For example, if we compare Heidegger’s deconstruction of the ‘work of art’ to Gilles Deleuze’s of cinema, one can’t help but notice the extent to which Deleuze’s engagement is absolutely inseparable from the cinematic medium of film, while Heidegger’s thinking, at least in OWA, seems largely detached from the question of medium specific to the arts in their individuality.
[15] For example, would it be possible to stage an encounter with the music of Bach or the cinema of Herzog via the Heideggerian notion of earth? Of course we don’t wish to rule out such an encounter, but to have reservations as to the likelihood of its success is entirely appropriate. Doesn’t the pride of place given to Dichtung as the privileged form of questioning in Heidegger’s work from the late 1930s onwards confirm this?
[16] Could we even say that Heidegger violates his own conception of ‘reading,’ where as we have seen, he regards it necessary for the reader to bring a concern of his own before he can begin to think the ‘unthought’ of the thinker with which he his engaging? In ignoring the specificity of the painting doesn’t Heidegger perpetrate the same gesture which characterizes virtually all philosophical relations with art, in which it is portrayed as either a vehicle of or hindrance to the revelation of truth? These are all important questions which unfortunately cannot all be dealt with here. For the remainder of this essay we will focus on the final one. For the moment I will proffer only a provisional answer. I think it erroneous to characterize Heidegger’s engagement with the work of art as perpetuating the violence in which so much aesthetic discourse has indulged hitherto. This is because Heidegger pace mimesis doesn’t take the work of art to be re-presenting truth in an impoverished or in the final analysis, inferior form. He recognizes ‘great art’ as a privileged mode of the very process whereby the essence of truth, divested of any mediation or intermediary, is disclosed to us. In this respect at least, his analysis adheres to Husserl’s phenomenological dictum, ‘to the things themselves!’
We have already spoken at some length of the nature of alētheia, but still haven’t tackled its relation to the nature and meaning of ‘essence’ as re-thought by Heidegger. When Heidegger uses Wesen
[17] what is he really driving at, and how is he distinguishing himself from the tradition? To try and answer this question or at the very least fashion a response of some sort, we will have to look at Heidegger’s lecture from 1930 On the Essence of Truth
[18] alongside OWA. Only through an in-depth scrutiny of Heidegger’s meditations on the essence of truth can we come to an appreciation of his contention that art is a privileged mode of truth-disclosure. We have already seen that Heidegger in numerous lectures counterposes the traditional conception of truth as correspondence to truth as unconcealment. We have however neglected thus far a crucial dimension of a-lētheia. We must now redress this before we can go any further.
This is the idea of lēthe or concealment which Heidegger on occasion conflates with what he calls the ‘oblivion of being’.
[lxxvi] As John Sallis has argued, Heidegger largely leaves behind the earlier more overtly phenomenological descriptions of truth as unconcealment in §44 of BT, which remain, albeit with some minor modifications, within the Husserlian schema of identification through intentional fulfilment.
[lxxvii] In stark contrast, Heidegger in the later stages of ET tells us that ‘truth and untruth are, in essence, not irrelevant to one another, but rather belong together’.
[lxxviii] It is concealment, according to Heidegger, that preserves what is most proper to alētheia, because it is the concealment of beings as a whole, that is ‘older’ or more originary than the conception of truth presented in §44 of BT, which understands truth as the showing itself to be truth. By means of a ‘retrieval’ of a ‘forgotten’ sense of ‘essence’, Heidegger is able to identify ‘un-truth’ as the real essence of truth without falling into contradiction. But in another sense, Heidegger’s endeavour isn’t a form of ‘retrieval’. In CP he actually states that the originary essence of alētheia, as unhiddenness, must first be expunged in favour of truth as correctness before the essential relation between truth and un-truth can arise as a question for us at all.
[lxxix]Da-sein inhabits and unfolds in its world. Da-sein’s ek-sistence
[19] illuminates the world and thereby shows up beings in accordance with needs, calculations and preoccupations. In the instance of Van Gogh’s painting, Heidegger claims that we gain an insight into the peasant woman’s daily concerns, her resilience, vicissitudes and the rich milieu that shapes and orientates her world.
[lxxx] It is only in the painting that all of these minutiae are distilled and brought to our attention, which otherwise may have gone unnoticed. By Heidegger’s acute and quite beautiful description I am not led to the conclusion that the peasant woman is merely the figment of a naïve and sentimental, not to say reactionary imagination. Quite the opposite, I am compelled to re-read Seamus Heaney’s poem Digging from his collection Death of a Naturalist (1966):
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
[lxxxi]Heidegger’s portrayal of the peasant woman and Heaney’s poetic depiction of his ancestors whom so diligently tilled the soil, are replete with a deep and profound respect, which verges on reverence. Both philosopher and poet esteem those who they describe, their relationship to the earth, and the daily toil that so fundamentally shapes every aspect of their dwelling in the world. Although at the same time there seems to be an unbridgeable chasm which can never be traversed but is dutifully acknowledged in lieu of the usual disdain and self-exalted superciliousness so prevalent amongst the urban intelligentsia.
According to Heidegger, this world can never be revealed in its entirety.
[lxxxii] Every moment that Da-sein’s world is illumined its being-in-the-world is at the same time concealed. Da-sein’s being consists in a two-fold movement of clearing (Lichtung) and concealing (Verbergung), of truth and un-truth.
[lxxxiii] ‘Because sheltering that clears belongs to it, Beyng appears originarily in the light of concealing withdrawal. The name of this clearing [Lichtung] is άλήθεια.’
[lxxxiv] By conceiving Da-sein’s relation to its world in this way, Heidegger is trying to dispel once and for all the fallacy of a possible reality stripped of perspective, or better, one of complete and unadulterated transparency. Every disclosure of truth, is at the same time an operation of concealing, and so an instance of un-truth. Because of this Heidegger calls un-truth the non-essence (Un-Wesen) of truth, which far from denoting an instance of privation, lack or negation designates a primordial mode of being.
[lxxxv] The Un-Wesen is distinct from the Nothing (das Nichts) which is for Heidegger interchangeable with the Lichtung of being.
[lxxxvi]The Un-Wesen, as an originary concealment, is not a ground (Grund) but rather an abyss that acts as a backdrop to the happening of truth.
[lxxxvii] This is what Heidegger means when he says that truth ‘in its essence, is un-truth.’
[lxxxviii] This is of course an extremely paradoxical notion. On the one hand, without this originary concealment there could be no unconcealment, no presence and therefore no world at all. While on the other, this originary concealment remains in abeyance, withdrawn from the world.
[lxxxix] Heidegger is trying his utmost to strike at the metaphysical tradition’s fetishization of ‘presence’ as the first and most fundamental sense of being. For Heidegger, ‘to be’ is not simply, nor primarily, to be present, since the world ‘worlds’ from out of an abyssal ‘ground’ that is forever in a state of withdrawal.
[xc] Heidegger is trying to disabuse us of the implacable desire for full and total presence, which has been largely responsible for the increasingly dire state of Seinsverlassenheit, all but ensuring the steady descent into an all-encompassing nihilism. The obsessive drive to known and denude reality of its most primordial dimension, not only precipitates a ‘forgetting’ of being, but comes to reign and dominate beings in such a way that the very question of the truth of being is wholly and absolutely effaced.
[xci]We are now able to elaborate upon our earlier incursions into OWA and the various manoeuvres made by Heidegger in his effort to reconfigure the essence of a-lētheia as a two-fold movement of concealment and unconcealment. It is during his vivid depiction of the peasant woman’s being-in-the-world that we first catch sight of the countervailing movements of ‘earth’ and ‘world,’ which for the moment we will take to approximate roughly to concealment and unconcealment respectively. He tells us that the shoes qua equipment ‘belong to the earth’ and find ‘protection in the world of the peasant woman.’
[xcii] Both are ‘essential traits’ belonging to the work-character of the work.
[xciii] Let’s look more closely at the meaning of ‘earth’ and ‘world’ and the ‘strife’ Heidegger takes to be definitive of their interaction.
As we have seen, the artwork ‘opens up a world’. A world is never merely a collection of things over against a human subject. As Heidegger writes so eloquently in BT, ‘in that it is, Da-sein has always already referred itself to an encounter with a “world.”’
[xciv] In that text ‘world’ is understood as a web of non-objective possible relations with things at one’s disposal, in current usage, and that surround us. The world is the horizon of our understanding. This is not an explicitly thematized or theoretical understanding but a practical everyday understanding of beings available for some use.
[xcv] In OWA he comments that wherever,
‘the essential decisions of our history are made, wherever we take them over or abandon them, wherever they go unrecognized or are brought once more into question, there the world worlds. The stone is world-less…The peasant woman, by contrast, possesses a world, since she stays in the openness of beings…By the opening of a world, all things gain their lingering and hastening, their distance and proximity, their breadth and their limits.’
[xcvi]From this remark and a number of others in OWA, one can say with confidence that the notion of human Da-sein as a locus of unconcealment still obtains. But in other passages one simply can’t ignore that Heidegger is steadily distancing himself from the ‘essence of truth’ in order to broach the question of the ‘truth of essence.’ With this reversal of emphasis Heidegger’s thinking ceases to operate strictly at the level of human Da-sein and he increasingly comes to think the Lichtung as a tendency found within being itself. Thus when Heidegger writes in OWA that the world ‘worlds’ he is speaking of this essential trait and movement of being, which brings beings to presence through the unfolding of ‘world’ towards the Open.
[20] Moreover, world is intrinsically linked to the epochal.
[xcvii] An epoch is a world considered from within the history of being and expresses the fundamental figures of the destiny of being. In the particular instance of the work of art the setting up of a world resides in its work-character.
[xcviii]Earth, as has already been intimated, is the antipodal tendency of being, set in contradistinction to world. This is to simplify matters slightly though. Earth and world don’t merely designate the opposing tendencies of being. As we have seen, earth or originary concealment is the more primordial of the two. It is out of the abyssal ‘ground’ or Ab-grund that world is first able to emerge. ‘Concealment as refusal is not primarily or only the limit of knowledge in each particular case; it is, rather, the beginning of the clearing of what is illuminated.’
[xcix] During a given epoch, whether it be Greek, Christian-medieval, Modern or Planetary, earth appears as the non-historical ‘ground’ that needs world in order to assume fully its epochal expression.
[c]Furthermore, to straightforwardly equate earth with concealment would be too hasty a move.
[21] By remaining undisclosed and unexplained earth in fact shows itself. Earth indeed appears in the Open, within the clearing of being, but it nonetheless remains manifestly hidden.
[ci] It shows itself in withdrawal, which in turn conveys its quintessential inscrutability. Earth, unlike the Greek word phusis, is not ‘metaphysical’ because it at not point signifies the name or names for beings in their totality.
[cii] Every effort to render it transparent and explicable is doomed to failure.
‘Earth shatters every attempt to penetrate it. It turns every merely calculational intrusion into an act of destruction. Though such destruction may be accompanied by the appearance of mastery and progress in the form of the technological-scientific objectification of nature, this mastery remains, nonetheless, an impotence of the will. The earth is openly illuminated as itself only where it is apprehended and preserved as the essentially undisclosable, as that which withdraws from every disclosure…The earth is the essentially self-secluding. To set forth the earth means: to bring it into the open as the self-secluding.’
[ciii]Michel Haar identifies the four most important senses of Heidegger’s notion of earth. First, earth belongs to the dimension of withdrawal that holds sway in unconcealment, of the lēthe that belongs to alētheia.
[civ] We have already spoken of this dimension at some length. Second, it is linked to what has become known as nature, and referred to in the Greek beginning as phusis. Third, it constitutes the ‘material’ of the work of art. Haar cogently argues that it is the earthly material of the artwork, which remains long after its world has vanished from the face of the planet that allows us to encounter a great artwork in all its poignancy and vigour in another epoch.
[cv] Fourth and finally, earth is the native soil, not in the sense of the ideology of Blut und Boden, but as the Heimat or homeland that is both given and chosen, the homeland in which one has come into one’s own.
[cvi] We have so far considered in varying levels of detail the first three meanings that Heidegger attributes to earth. Due to issues of space we will unfortunately have to leave the fourth sense for another time. Approaching the final stretch of this paper I would like to discuss more thoroughly the nature of the ‘strife’ said to rage between ‘earth’ and ‘world’ within the work of art.
In OWA Heidegger tells us that the work of art ‘sets up’ a world and ‘sets forth’ earth. It is thus the work of art itself which instigates their ‘strife’ (Streit) and mutual antagonism, for it is the work-character of the work that foments the conflictual interplay of world and earth. World and earth are essentially different and yet inseparable from one another. In their essential strife they incite the self-assertion (Selbstbehauptung) of their respective essences.
[cvii] As each is compelled by the other to exceed itself, the conflict of earth and world is heightened to an almost unbearable intensity. In their heightened state of intransigence an unspeakable intimacy becomes all the more evident. ‘The earth cannot do without the openness of world if it is to appear in the liberating surge of its self-closedness. World, on the other hand, cannot float away from the earth if, as the prevailing breadth and path of all essential destiny, it is to ground itself on something decisive.’
[cviii] This ‘primal strife’ exists within the essence of truth which is in itself the ur-strife (Urstreit), in which is ‘won that open centre within which beings stand, and from out of which they withdraw into themselves.’
[cix] This is the originary polemos of being; the struggle between truth and un-truth.
This struggle never appears in itself, but only in actions and works.
[cx] The essence of strife hence, in the final analysis, means this: that all beings, things and events belong to history (Geschichte), and therefore to the Geschick, to the sending or destining of being.
[cxi] Being is inexplicable dirempted from its epochal figurations, but there must still be something of the non-historical continually entering into this history, at once informed by it, but also incessantly withdrawing from its grasp.
[cxii] The setting-of-truth-into-the-work which Heidegger defines as the essence of art, establishes itself in the strife and ‘space’ that truth itself opens up.
[cxiii] The truth of the artwork, of course, is present only as the strife between clearing and concealing in the opposition between earth and world, which in turn belongs to the history of being (Seinsgeschichte), and its epochal constellations.
[cxiv]All great artworks irrespective of their medium, erect within the density of a specific earth a ‘figure’ (Gestalt) of ‘truth’ or disclosure.
[cxv] ‘This strife which is brought into the rift-design, and so set back into the earth and fixed in place, is the figure…The createdness of the work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure. Figure is the structure of the rift in its self-establishment. The structured rift is the jointure [Fuge] of the shining of truth.’
[cxvi] The Gestalt acts as the trace of a strife between world, a historic dimension, and an earth, which is to say a pre-historical ‘ground’.
[cxvii] Its purpose is to bring to light the ‘crack’, ‘fissure’ or ‘rift’ (Riss) that unites by means of antagonism, the historicality of the world and the a-historicality of the earth.
[cxviii] It is the earthly tendency or proclivity of the work of art, which forecloses the possibility of it exclusively belonging to the world and therefore history.
[cxix] The artwork enters history only after having given birth to history. ‘Art is history in the essential sense: it is the ground of history.’
[cxx] The capacity of a ‘great’ artwork to make manifest the unity of an entire epoch with unparalleled acuity is therefore ultimately non-historical; it is what binds world and earth together and most clearly evinced by the caesura situated in the ‘figure’ of the artwork.
[cxxi]ConclusionEven though we have by no means exhausted the richness of Heidegger’s thought on either aesthetics or the work of art we must draw our discussion to a close. There is a great deal of material that we have not touched upon. I hope though, that at the very least the two theses that were set out at the beginning of this paper have been partially vindicated. Our first thesis was that Heidegger isn’t triumphantly proclaiming the end of art, but rather the end of what he takes to be ‘aesthetics,’ a discipline that is itself ultimately derivative of metaphysical speculation. With the possible exception of the early Greeks, art as theorized by aesthetics has almost invariably been conceived as either a vehicle of or hindrance to truth. This is perhaps best exemplified in the mimetic function assigned to art by Plato.
[22] Heidegger proceeds to take this precedent as paradigmatic of philosophy’s long-standing subordination of art to knowledge, and regards this as characteristic from Plato to Hegel. This process, as we have seen, culminates in Nietzsche’s ‘inversion of Platonism,’ which only assures the preponderance of metaphysical dogma and prejudice in a renewed and far more menacing form. The epiphenomenal nature of ‘aesthetics’ should be evident from the parallels and correlations Heidegger establishes between the history of aesthetics and the history of Western metaphysics.
Our second thesis was that Heidegger offers us a ‘non-metaphysical’ alternative, which eschews the pitfalls and violent distortions committed by aesthetic discourse. Heidegger tells us that art ‘is the setting-itself-to-work of truth.’
[cxxii] Art doesn’t represent truth in a retrograde form. Art, for Heidegger, is a privileged mode of the happening of truth. This is essentially what ‘beauty’ means. This is not a mere reversal of the kind he attributes to Nietzsche, because integral to his thought of the work of art as a happening of truth is a fundamental rethinking of the truth of essence and the way we comport ourselves toward being. Un-truth, concealment and absence become absolutely indispensable to the event of truth which unfolds in great works of art. It is this dimension that we can never directly access, which enables the artwork to resonate and move us long after the dissolution of its world. Furthermore, this is not a static process but one that is forever ongoing and renewed generation after generation, by the strife which the artwork generates between earth and world. Although we have addressed the basic tenets of Heidegger’s meditation on the nature of art, there are still a plethora of questions that remain unanswered. To name a few: what is the fate of conceptual art? What of music, drama, theatre and cinema? Can Heidegger really hope to capture their respective diversity, richness and creativity without a more attentive attitude to their specificity and the medium within which they receive expression? What is the relation of Dichtung to the other arts? Some of these issues have received attention in the literature and some haven’t. But what is perhaps most important to recognize is that such questions can’t be peremptorily tossed aside if Heidegger’s alternative to ‘aesthetics’ is to have the ramifications to which it sincerely aspires.
BibliographyAllison, H. E., Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Cambridge University Press, 2001
De Beistegui, Miguel, The New Heidegger, Continuum, 2005
De Beistegui, Miguel, Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, Routledge, 1998
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[1] He states his position vis-à-vis the entwinement of the ‘overcoming’ of ‘aesthetics’ with that of ‘metaphysics’ in especially clear terms in one of the final sections of his Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), entitled “Metaphysics” and the Origin of the Work of Art. It is highly significant and worthy of extensive quotation: ‘The question of the origin of the work of art does not aim at a timelessly valid determination of what is ownmost to the work of art, which could simultaneously serve as the guiding-thread for a historically retrospective explanation of history of art. This question is most intimately connected with the task of overcoming aesthetics and that means simultaneously with overcoming a certain conception of beings as what is objectively representable. Overcoming of aesthetics again results necessarily from the historical encounter with metaphysics as such. This metaphysics comprises the basic Western position toward beings and thus also the ground for what is heretofore the ownmost of Western art and its works. Overcoming of metaphysics means freeing the priority of the question of the truth of being in the face of any “ideal,” “causal,” and “transcendental” and “dialectical” explanation of beings. Overcoming of metaphysics is, however, not discarding the hitherto existing philosophy but rather the leap into its first beginning, without wanting to renew this beginning – something that remains historically [historisch] unreal and historically [geschichtlich] impossible.’ (p354)
[2] Henceforth OWA. In fact, I am using the so-called ‘definitive’ version of the essay published with appendixes in 1950. This version however is based upon a series of lectures given in 1936. If Heidegger’s own marginalia or appendixes are referenced the reader will to notified.
[3] Henceforth, CP.
[4] Henceforth, IM.
[5] Henceforth, BT.
[6] Henceforth WPA and PDT respectively.
[7] Henceforth BDT.
[8] Henceforth EP.
[9] ‘In the thought of the Greeks and all the more completely so in the philosophy that followed, the essence of truth as άλήθεια remained unthought. Unconcealment is, for thought, what is most concealed in Greek existence. At the same time, however, it is that which, from early times, has determined the presence of everything present.’ (OWA, p28)
[10] Henceforth WCT.
[11] It has to be said here that Wagner is presented by Heidegger in a very cut and dried fashion. This however is not the place to contest it.
[12] Henceforth NW.
[13] This is not only a simplification of Nietzsche but a rather crude presentation of Heidegger’s analysis, which due to issues of space and relevance I can’t possibly address adequately here.
[14] In this essay I will not be addressing the controversy over whether the peasant shoes in the painting did in fact belong to a member of the peasantry or belonged to Van Gogh himself. This is certainly an important question and has already received an exhaustive treatment by Jacques Derrida in his wonderful essay Restitutions of the truth in pointing in his The Truth of Painting. In brief, Meyer Shapiro’s criticism is that Heidegger wrongly attributes the shoes depicted in the painting to a member of the peasantry, when they actually, according to Shapiro, belonged to Van Gogh himself. The ‘debate’ between Shapiro and Heidegger is thus preoccupied with the issue of ‘restitution’ i.e. restoring the shoes (in the painting) to their rightful owner (outside the painting). Derrida brilliantly exposes just how uncritically Shapiro moves between the inside and the outside of the painting. For Shapiro it’s almost as though there were no frame separating them. Derrida also shows how Shapiro completely ignores Heidegger’s re-thinking of art as ‘the setting-itself-to-work of truth’, which is deeply antipathetic to the conception of art as either ‘imitation’ or ‘description’. The artwork for Heidegger isn’t supposed to ‘copy’ or ‘reproduce’ the ‘real’; this conception of the artwork is exactly what Heidegger is trying his utmost is distance himself from. (See, Shades-Of Painting at the Limit, John Sallis, p33-4) The objective of this part of the essay is to clearly evince and elucidate the relationship between Heidegger’s thinking of the essence of truth and the artwork as a specific mode of truth-disclosure.
[15] I.e. Film in the case of cinema, paint and composition in the instance of painting, arrangement vis-à-vis music etc… Heidegger doesn’t ignore the question of medium as such, but the specific medium which pertains to and gives expression to each one of the arts in their individuality. Thus earth, as shall be shown below, in one sense constitutes the ‘material’ of the work of art. But is this too general a ‘category’? Or are we simply being intellectually lazy by precluding such a possibility, only because Heidegger himself failed to investigate its feasibility? These are not easy questions and I don’t claim to offer any easy solutions or quick-fixes capable of dissipating their abiding obduracy.
[16] Heidegger, for example writes in OWA, ‘The essence of art is poetry. The essence of poetry, however, is the founding [Stiftung] of truth.’ (OWA, p47). However, the privilege Heidegger assigns to poetry isn’t at all straightforward. He distinguishes Dichtung from Poesie. Poesie is poetry in the usual sense. Dichtung, by contrast, is poetry in the sense of something, which informs all works of art. So Poesie is perhaps only privileged in the sense of being an exemplary form of Dichtung. Unfortunately, we can’t deal with this question fully here due to issues of space and relevance.
[17] The German Wesen is not exactly the same as the Latin essentia. It is a verb as well as a noun. As a verb, it means to be (sein), to happen (geschehen), and to linger (sich aufhalten). It is derived from the old High German wesan which also connotes, to tarry or sojourn (verweilen), to dwell or inhabit (wohnen), and to stay (übernachten). It possesses the clear sense of an ongoing process or unfolding. (The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p51). In ET Heidegger explains the verbal nature of essence in a captious and almost cryptic note appended to the second edition in 1949: ‘In the question of the truth of essence, essence is understood verbally; in this word, remaining still within metaphysical presentation, Beyng is thought as the difference that holds sway between Being and beings.’ (On the Essence of Truth in Pathmarks, Martin Heidegger, p153).
[18] Henceforth, ET. The lecture was given a number of times during 1930 with the final version published in 1943.
[19] Heidegger coins this term for human existence in contradistinction to the Latin existentia and its associations with the German Existenz.
[20] Heidegger clearly speaks of ‘world’ in different senses. For example, as the horizon of human Da-sein’s understanding, and as an inherent tendency found within being itself. I will not distinguish the senses of Heidegger’s use of ‘world’ by capitalizing the latter meaning, for the same reason I have refrained from signifying the being of beings with a capital ‘b’ – it creates an easy and simplistic distinction where there is none. The problem doesn’t arise in German because all nouns are capitalized so why should we allow the superimposition of emphasis in English translations where Heidegger placed none?
[21] ‘But world is not simply the open which corresponds to the clearing, earth is not simply the closed that corresponds to concealment…Earth is not simply the closed but that which rises up as self-closing. World and earth are essentially in conflict, intrinsically belligerent. Only as such do they enter the strife of clearing and concealing.’ (OWA, p31)
[22] We must recognize, as does Heidegger, that Plato’s views in texts such as Phaedrus greatly complicates this crude picture, and shows how sophisticated Plato’s view in fact are. Heidegger does actually attempt to show this in one section dedicated specifically to the Phaedrus in The Will to Power as Art (p188-199).
[i] What is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, trans. Graham Burchell & Hugh Tomlinson, Verso, 1994, p109
[ii] Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, 1999, p232
[iii] The Origin of the Work of Art in Off the Beaten Track, Martin Heidegger, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p18
[iv] Nietzsche Volume I: The Will to Power as Art, Martin Heidegger, trans. David Farrell Krell, Harper Collins, 1991, p77
[v] Ibid, p78
[vi] Ibid, p80
[vii] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, Continuum, 2005, p128
[viii] Ibid, p128
[ix] Ibid, p128
[x] Ibid, p128
[xi] Building Dwelling Thinking in Basic Writings, Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell, 1993, p360
[xii] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p128
[xiii] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p80
[xiv] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p8
[xv] Ibid, p8
[xvi] Ibid, p8
[xvii] Plato’s Doctrine of Truth in Pathmarks, Martin Heidegger, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p173
[xviii] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p80
[xix] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p9
[xx] Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Martin Heidegger, p173
[xxi] Ibid, p176
[xxii] Ibid, p177
[xxiii] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p80
[xxiv] Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Martin Heidegger, p176
[xxv] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p81
[xxvi] Introduction to Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger, trans. Richard Polt & Gregory Fried, Yale University Press, 2000, p15
[xxvii] The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, Michel Haar, trans. Reginald Lilly; foreword by John Sallis, Indiana University Press, 1993, p48
[xxviii] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p81
[xxix] Ibid, p82
[xxx] Ibid, p82
[xxxi] Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Martin Heidegger, p176
[xxxii] The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking in On Time and Being, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, University of Chicago Press, 2002, p70
[xxxiii] What is Called Thinking?, Martin Heidegger, trans. J. Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, 1968, p77; See also Thinking After Heidegger, David Wood, Polity Press, 2002, p63
[xxxiv] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p83
[xxxv] Heidegger and the Political: Dystopias, Miguel de Beistegui, Routledge, 1998, p79
[xxxvi] Ibid, p79
[xxxvii] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p83
[xxxviii] Critique of the Power of Judgement, Immanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 20: 224; p26
[xxxix] Ibid, 20:221; p23
[xl] Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, Henry E. Allison, Cambridge University Press, 2001, p50
[xli] Ibid, p50
[xlii] Ibid, p50
[xliii] Critique of the Power of Judgement, Immanuel Kant, 5:217; p102
[xliv] Ibid, 5:217; p102
[xlv] Kant’s Theory of Taste, Henry E. Allison, p48
[xlvi] Critique of the Power of Judgement, Immanuel Kant, 5:239; p123
[xlvii] Ibid, 5: 218; p103
[xlviii] Ibid, 5:218; p103
[xlix] Kant’s Theory of Taste, Henry E. Allison, p54
[l] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p84
[li] Ibid, p84
[lii] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p133
[liii] Ibid, p133
[liv] Ibid, p133
[lv] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p85
[lvi] Ibid, p86
[lvii] Ibid, p88
[lviii] Nietzsche’s Word: “God is Dead” in Off the Beaten Track, Martin Heidegger, ed. and trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p165
[lix] Ibid, p165
[lx] Twilight of the Idols / The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, 1990, p51
[lxi] Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, Martin Heidegger, p174
[lxii] Nietzsche’s Word, p181
[lxiii] Ibid, p181
[lxiv] Nietzsche Volume I, p91
[lxv] Heidegger and the Political, Miguel de Beistegui, p78-9
[lxvi] Heidegger’s Ways, Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. John W. Stanley; introduction by Dennis J. Schmidt, State University of New York Press, 1994, p102
[lxvii] Ibid, p102
[lxviii] Ibid, p102
[lxix] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p15
[lxx] Ibid, p16
[lxxi] Shades-Of Painting at the Limit, John Sallis, Indiana University Press, 1998, p33
[lxxii] Ibid, p33
[lxxiii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p32
[lxxiv] Ibid, p19
[lxxv] Ibid, p33
[lxxvi] Nietzsche Volume I, Martin Heidegger, p193-4
[lxxvii] Double Truth, John Sallis, State University of New York Press, 1995, p77
[lxxviii] On the Essence of Truth in Pathmarks, Martin Heidegger, ed. William McNeill, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p146
[lxxix] Double Truth, John Sallis, p86
[lxxx] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p14
[lxxxi] Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, Seamus Heaney, Faber &Faber, 1998, p3-4
[lxxxii] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p51
[lxxxiii] Ibid, p51
[lxxxiv] On the Essence of Truth, Martin Heidegger, p154
[lxxxv] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p52
[lxxxvi] Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian influences on his work, trans. with a complementary essay, by Graham Parkes, Routledge, 1996, p33
[lxxxvii] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p52
[lxxxviii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p31
[lxxxix] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p52
[xc] Ibid, p52-3
[xci] Heidegger and the Political, Miguel de Beistegui, p76
[xcii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p14
[xciii] Ibid, p26
[xciv] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press,1996, p81
[xcv] The Song of the Earth, Michel Haar, p10
[xcvi] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p23
[xcvii] The Song of the Earth, Michel Haar, p58
[xcviii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p24
[xcix] Ibid, p30
[c] The Song of the Earth – Michel Haar – p58
[ci] Ibid, p57
[cii] Ibid, p48
[ciii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p25
[civ] The Song of the Earth,Michel Haar, pxii
[cv] Ibid, pxii
[cvi] Ibid, pxii
[cvii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p26
[cviii] Ibid, p27
[cix] Ibid, p31
[cx] The Song of the Earth, Michel Haar, p58
[cxi] Ibid, p58
[cxii] Ibid, p58
[cxiii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p36
[cxiv] Ibid, p37
[cxv] The Song of the Earth, Michel Haar, p95
[cxvi] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p37
[cxvii] The Song of the Earth, Michel Haar, p95
[cxviii] Ibid, p95
[cxix] Ibid, p96
[cxx] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p49
[cxxi] The Song of the Earth, Michel Haar, p96
[cxxii] The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger, p49
© Sadegh Kabeer
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