EN4242
Critical
Theory
Heidegger:
Art and Technology
Since
the beginning of Western thought the being of beings emerges as what is alone
worthy of thought. If we think this
historic development in a truly historical way, then that in which the
beginning of Western thought rests first becomes manifest: that in Greek
antiquity the being of beings becomes worthy of thought is the beginning of the West and is the hidden source of its destiny. Had this beginning not safeguarded what has
been, i.e., the gathering of what still endures, the
being of beings would not now govern from the essence of modern
technology. Through technology the
entire globe is today embraced and held fast in a kind of being experienced in
Western fashion and represented on the epistemological models of European
metaphysics and science. (Heidegger Lögos 76).
1.
The Tradition: a series
of interpretations that each time transforms ideas but with no memory of the
transformation
The
rootlessness of Western thinking (the forgetting of being)
Language:
Words don’t mean:
1)
what they used to mean (that’s not the point of
etymology)
2)
merely what we think they mean
The
importance of the word is its conceptual potential, which includes:
3) what
they might one day mean
Greek
(hypokeimenon)
Roman (subiectum)
Medieval (subject)
Modern (subject)
Wonder (the question of being)
Ratio and mood
2.
The Thing (assaults
on the essence of thing):
a)
the bearer
of a collection of characteristics (subject with predicates) (5-7)
b)
aesthesis: a sensory manifold
(7-8)
c) matter and form (form and content) (8-9)
What I want to do here is to
present as firm a sense as possible of what Heidegger means by his novel
coinages world and earth in the context of his discussion
of the artwork and of Dichtung
(poetry/literature) in particular.
The pertinent section is “The
Thing and the Work” (4-19 in the CUP translation). Heidegger begins by asking about the “thingliness of the thing.”
The procedure is as ever deceptively simple. When questioning something with respect to its being we ask what it is in its essence (the catness of a cat, the literariness of literature, the worldness of world, etc.).
We ask in other words what is it
(what quality, what attribute) especially that makes something the specific
kind of thing it is. You can see straight away that Heidegger does
not follow a classical phenomenological method (it’s not a matter of meditating
on the object). We must pass through the word thing
and the linguistic and philosophical clutter that has accumulated around it
before we can begin to get a sense of what is at stake in the question. But he is not to start with asking
about anything particular. Even before
the question of the artwork he asks the question of the thing. So he’s asking about
the meaning of one of the most general words we have, das Ding, the thing. “What, in truth, is a
thing,” he asks, “insofar as it is a thing?”
It makes some sense, doesn’t it, to proceed in this way? If you want to know what something is then you’d better already know what is meant by thing.
It is through the concept of thing
that Heidegger proceeds to ask the question of the artwork.
Heidegger begins with the things
we call things. It seems at first that nothing is excluded
(he mentions, jugs, paths, wells, milk etc., as well as things that fail to
appear, like God and the Kantian “thing in itself” or “the world as a
totality”). So according to a
philosophical attitude that Heidegger is problematizing, the artwork is
regarded also as a “thing.” He then
acknowledges some distinctions. God,
humans and deer (for instance) we would hesitate to call “things.” In fact “mere thing” is reserved, really, for
stones, clods of earth and pieces of wood: “it is the things of nature and
usage that are normally called things” (5).
So we end up with a contrast between the broadest domain (everything is
a thing) and the narrow region (the mere thing). Heidegger recommends, at this point, that in
order “to be relieved of the tedious effort of making our own inquiry into the thingliness of the thing,” we just need to attend to the
traditional knowledge. In other words,
we interpret the existing interpretations.
There are, broadly, three
interpretations of the thingness of the thing:
1. Substance
and Accidents: the core of a thing for the Greeks was its hypokeimenon, its
“substance” as we translate it, and its external qualities were its symbebekos, its accidents. Everything, according to this interpretation
has its core (what it is) and its
accidents (like my hair and eye colour, for
instance). Heidegger shows that this
interpretation constitutes an attack
on the thing. It is worth noting that
this first interpretation is the metaphysical interpretation, according
to which a thing’s attributes are distinct from its transcendent essence.
2. Aestheton: a thing regarded in
its aesthetic qualities, as “the unity of a sensory manifold” (how it tastes,
what it looks like, its smell, the way it sounds and how it feels). Heidegger’s response to this interpretation
involves showing that one doesn’t simply ever hear mere sound: “In the house we
hear the door slam—never acoustic sensations or mere noises” (8). It erroneously assumes that what is received
by the senses constitutes a thing’s thingness.
The second interpretation is the empirical
interpretation.
3. Form and Matter: If one emphasizes one or other of the first two
interpretations the thing disappears (in the first it is too far away from the
body and in the second it is too close to it).
The third interpretation, Heidegger suggests, seems to allow the thing
“to remain unmolested in its resting-within-itself itself” (8). In this interpretation the materiality of a thing (its colour, its hardness or softness, its size) is posited at
the same time as its form: “The thing
is formed matter” (8). But, says,
Heidegger, we should trust this interpretation no more than we can trust the
first two, despite the fact that it is this opposition that conventionally
guides criticism in the fields concerned with art and literature.
The reason that this last
interpretation comes to the fore is because it represents the thing as having
been made. Creation
functions in both the biblical sense, according to which God makes the world,
and in the modern industrial sense, according to which we make our equipment. The
work is thus regarded from the point of view of the same conceptual system that
functions both in medieval theology and modern industry: on the model (on the
basis of an interpretation) of the equipmentality of
equipment. Heidegger thus proposes
to take a different tack. Instead of
interpreting the artwork on the basis of an interpretation of it as a kind of
equipment, he proceeds to interpret the equipmentality
of equipment by interpreting an artwork that takes equipment as its topic. He doesn’t say: Let’s take an example of an
artwork and examine it in the light of our interpretation of things as
equipment. He says: Let’s take an
example of equipment … as presented by an
artwork.
Something strange and interesting
happens. We learn, first of all, that
the truth of equipment is not the matter/form dichotomy (according to which a
thing is formed matter) but reliability. So long is it does what one needs it to then
its function is secure. Its usefulness resides in its reliability. Equipment functions best when we are not even
aware that it is functioning at all.
Heidegger builds out of the stark emptiness of the shoes depicted by Van
Gogh a sense of the wearer’s everydayness, which the painting—and the
painting alone—can suggest, by the fact that it has brought the shoes out of their everyday context and
rendered them in relief against it. So,
“in passing,” we have learned what the truth of equipment is because the artwork has taught us this. In Heidegger’s reading—which is the
kind of creative yet controlled projection that requires a confidence that can
only be won through practice—the shoes belong to a peasant woman. The point is to establish the relationship
between the appearance, in the painting, of the shoes and the world, not represented as such in the painting,
but which can be read from “the dark opening of the well-worn insides of the
shoes.” This is Heidegger’s first
mention of the coupling of world and earth.
He says: “This equipment belongs to
the earth and finds protection in the world
of the peasant woman. From out of this
protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself”
(14). The shoes—in this
reading—actually play a very precise function. They are the mediating element between the
“world” of the peasant woman (her entire un-theorized existence at work or at
rest) and the sphere in which her activities have their meaning and to which they give meaning. The shoes literally carry world across the earth. The painting itself plays something like this exact same function. It mediates between those who gaze at it (in
the gaze the painting finds its
protection) and the earth on which they
tread. The artwork thus raises to consciousness what otherwise remains unnoticed or
at least remains otherwise unremarkable.
If one turns
to the following section, “The Work and Truth” (19-33), we find Heidegger
expounding on this mediating relationship at greater length with reference to
the Greek temple. Earth is explicitly
equated there with the Greek Phúsis (normally translated as “nature”). But, if the temple gives to its ground the sense of “homeland” or heimatliche Grund, then this is because there is
never any independent existence of earth before the separation between the two,
between the world (the familiarity of these things that surround us and on
which we play out our lives) and the earth (the things themselves): “Men and
animals, plants and things, are never present and familiar as unalterable
things fortuitously constituting a suitable environment for the temple that, one
day, is added to what is present. […] The temple first gives to things their
look, and to men their outlook on themselves” (21). The temple mediates, sure enough, between men
and the earth on which they stand, but the mediation
is prior to any sense that world
and/or earth can have in their separation.
The mediation both separates
and brings together the domain
reserved on the one hand for things and on the other for meaning.
3. Equipment and equipmentality
(usage and purpose) (mere thing = the removal of its serviceability)
An
artwork shows …
Vincent Van Gogh
A Pair of Shoes (1887) A
Pair of Shoes (1885)
Oil on Canvas, 34 x 41.5cm Oil
on canvas 37x45cm
The Two Kinds of Truth:
Truth as Correspondence
and Aletheia
Aletheia
Ereignis, happening, the event, appropriation
4.
Earth and World
Earth
World
setting back setting
up/setting forth
that which withdraws from every disclosure self-opening
openness
[compare
also Saussure/Lacan:]
Signifier
(a concept) Signified
(conceptual potential)
5.
Truth
Correspondence (agreement, adequatio)
[the Modern era
exemplified by Descartes: Cogito ergo Sum;
we can be deceived by 1. senses, 2. established knowledge and 3. ordinary
language use; therefore, knowledge must be regarded fundamentally as a kind of judgement (e.g., velocity =
distance/time)]
Aletheia (unconcealment)
(and strife) (Descartes also unwittingly reveals Aletheia)
The relationship between Correspondence and Aletheia
shows how truth as correspondence is dependent on a kind of truth that it
cannot comprehend.
“That, as appearance, the being can deceive
us is the condition of the possibility of our deceiving ourselves rather than
the other way round” (30).
Concealment: obstructing or
refusing—the clearing happens as
concealment
“Truth is,
dialectically speaking, always its opposite as well”
(31).
6.
The Exhibits
1. The Painting
2. The
3. Poetry (Dichtung) (and the alternative
account of language, not as communication but as that which “brings beings as
beings into the open” (46)
Summary
In 1934 Heidegger began a series of lectures
on Friedrich Hölderlin, which would occupy him until
the early 1940s. Hölderlin,
the enigmatic German poet and contemporary of Hegel, emerges in Heidegger’s
discussions as a resource for his radically alternative exposition of the place
of human being in the world. In 1935 he
lectured on “The Origin of the Work of Art”, three successively different
versions of which emerged as articles.
The key distinction in the article is between world and earth and the
article works through three rather different kinds of artworks. His reading of Van Gogh’s Shoes shows that art can be regarded
neither as merely an aesthetic object designed to give pleasure or to portray
beauty, nor as a kind of thing with the addition of aesthetic beauty. Rather, art discloses the nature of things. Equipment, unlike art, disguises its status
as a thing. Its material nature is
absorbed in its function. The artwork,
however, draws attention to the materials from which it was formed. The artwork thus draws attention to the
struggle between form and matter. Van
Gogh’s painting of shoes shows what would not normally be evident. The involvement of the shoes in the world of
the peasant disappears from view while they are being worn; but put into view,
as in Van Gogh’s painting, the shoes reveal that world itself and the relation
of that world to the earth. But what is
the earth? Heidegger shifts his
attention to a Greek Temple, partly to underline the fact that his reading of
artworks is not based on a model of representation. The shoes in the Van Gogh example do the work
of explication not because of the painting’s naturalistic or evocative
qualities. Rather the role of the shoes
as equipment is revealed in an artwork that takes as its topic the medium
between the world of the peasant and the earth on which the peasant
treads. (A famous reading of Heidegger’s
artwork essay takes him to task rather pedantically by pointing out that the
shoes in Van Gogh’s painting were actually his own). The temple shows how a work of art not only
opens up a world but also unifies and structures the world of a historical
people. In doing so it contextualizes
the earth upon which it stands, instituting a particular interpretation of the
relationship between the cultural contrivances of Dasein
and the natural world with which those contrivances are engaged. Finally, Heidegger turns to what he calls Dichtung, which in its fully etymological sense
means invention. The ordinary and the
everyday is made strange in art, revealing the struggle between the newness of
art and the state of things out of which it had to have emerged. The meaning of Dichtung in the normal sense is,
of course, poetry. Because the matter or
earth of poetry is language and because language is what gives Dasein names for beings, then poetry has the power of
addressing the possibility of human communications and relations. The relationship between world and earth,
when it takes the form of linguistic innovation, reveals the torturous ways in
which the relations between concepts and words are formed and form each
other. Poetry can thus be grasped as the
most essential kind of artwork because it performs an absolutely singular
intervention that is also a form of disclosing.
Poetry reveals the conditions on which not only artworks but all other kinds of communicating and all other kinds of
thing are possible at all. For this
reason Heidegger increasingly privileges Dichtung in his works of this
period and later. The disclosing of
being—if it is to be achieved in any way that eludes the classifying,
calculating procedures of modernity—must be an evidently singular event
each time.
One might always try this (at home!) with similar architectural
sites, like the Roman Coliseum (or Colloseum).
E. A. Poe’s “Coliseum”
Loy
(Lunar Baedecker)
Kafka
For we
are as tree-trunks in the snow. They appear
to lie flat on the surface and with a little push one should
be able to set them rolling. No, one cannot, for they are
firmly fixed to the ground. But look, even that is mere appearance.
(Franz Kafka).
Der Blinde Junge
Mina Loy
The dam Bellona
littered
her
eyeless offspring
Kriegsopfer
upon
the pavements of
Sparkling precipitate
the
spectral day
involves
the
visionless obstacle
this
slow blind face
pushing
its virginal nonentity
against
the light
Pure purposeless
eremite
of
centripetal sentience
Upon the carnose horologe of the ego
the
vibrant tendon index moves not
since
the black lightening desecrated
the
retinal altar
Void and extinct
this
planet of the soul
strains
from the craving throat
in
static flight upslanting
A downy youth's snout
nozzling the sun
drowned
in dumfounded instinct
Listen!
illuminati
of the coloured earth
How this
expressionless "thing"
blows
out damnation and concussive dark
Upon a mouth-organ
Link
Martin
Heidegger (life and work): an intellectual biography by John
Phillips—you will find a tighter version in Twentieth-Century
European Cultural Theorists (second Series), ed. Paul Hansom, DLB vol. 296.
Recommended References
Michael Inwood. Heidegger: A
Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 1997).
Timothy Clark. Martin
Heidegger (
Richard Polt. Heidegger: An Introduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1999).
Julian Young. Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (