 |
|
|
|
| Text only | |||||
|
|
||||
|
|||||
Home | About the Centre | Proposal for the Centre | Progress Report | Participants and Advisory Board
Staff Publications | Events | Events Video Archive | Text Only
(This essay was originally presented at the conference, “Heidegger y el arte de verdad” in Pamplona, 2004. Its proceedings were published in the Cuardernos de la Cátedra Jorge Oteiza, ed. F. Duque [Pamplona 2005])
Readers of “The Origin of the Work of Art” will recognize immediately the source of the title I have proposed for this presentation. Heidegger insists in this magnificent essay of 1935-36 that the art work is distinguished from the piece of equipment or the tool by the way the earth has been used for its fashioning. Whereas the creation of equipment commits the matter from which it is formed wholly to its instrumental ends, thereby “using it up,” the creation of the art work involves a kind of use that honors its earthly component. The art work lets the earth be.
The theme will be familiar to Heidegger’s readers, but its meaning can hardly be transparent inasmuch as it concerns the very limits of meaning and the dimension of the aletheic movement that is most recalcitrant to thought, namely its earthly component. The earth, by its nature, resists disclosure and introduces uncertainty in all decision. It is irreducibly ambiguous. The obscurity of the theme is then further compounded by the notion of “use” itself, which remains largely unexplored in readings of Heidegger. Thus, to address the theme of the “use of the earth” on this occasion, I need to address both elements of the phrase. I need to bring forth how creation, in the work of art, is a form of use, or “usage,” and how this usage, in the context of art, involves the earth.
Let me begin with usage, and let me observe, first, that Heidegger’s use of the term in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is quite circumspect. Despite the fact that Heidegger had declared in his course lectures of the winter semester of 1934-35 that Hölderlin had reached “one of the highest and most isolated peaks of Western thought” when he wrote in “Der Rhein” that the gods “need and use mortals” (“Den brauchen sie”),1 the reference to the artistic use of the earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art” remains quite muted. The essay of 1935, An Introduction to Metaphysics, recollects the Hölderlinian insight far more forcefully than does the art work essay, and its use of the notion of usage is more in keeping with the later developments of the motif as it becomes a master-word in Heidegger’s thinking (he tells us there that “Being needs man”). But the moment of its appearance in the art work essay is nevertheless striking for the fact that it signals a fairly dramatic shift in Heidegger’s understanding of the nature of human doing or acting--everything he tried to grasp in the Greek notions of praxis and poiesis in the writings of the 20's and early 30's. Indeed, my hypothesis would be that if its use is so muted in the art work essay, it is because the implications of its appearance for Heidegger’s thinking of human action are so far-reaching. I will return to evidence of this point shortly.
To indicate the significance of the shift to which I have alluded, let me compare briefly for you the argument of the art work essay concerning the form-matter distinction, and statements from Heidegger’s extraordinary lecture series of 1927, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology.2 You will remember that Heidegger takes his departure in the art work essay from an effort to characterize the “thingly” character of the work. His analysis leads him through three general approaches to thingness, only the last of which appears pertinent to the work’s special form of self-subsistence. This last understanding of the work’s thingly quality is grounded in the traditional “form/matter” distinction which Heidegger describes, in italics, as “the conceptual schema which is used, in the greatest variety of ways, quite generally for all art theory and aesthetics.”3 Linked to a series of other metaphysical binary distinctions, it offers to representation “a conceptual machinery that nothing is capable of withstanding” (OWA 27/12). The stakes of this argument are obviously high.
Heidegger’s way of displacing the hold of the conceptual opposition is to suggest that it derives from the sphere of instrumental production and has been appropriately applied to the art work. When we examine a piece of equipment, he notes, its usefulness (here, Dienlichkeit) is what immediately strikes us. “Usefulness is the basic feature from which the entity regards us, that is flashes at us and thereby is present and thus is this entity” (OWA 28/12). In short, usefulness constitutes the essence of this entity that has been made in such a way that the form required by its purpose dictates the kind of matter to be employed and wholly absorbs this matter in relation to the end to be served. In the art work, on the other hand, the thingly quality of the object resists such subsumption; indeed, it is brought forth in such a way as to give the work an insistent and self-sufficient presence. To honor this dimension of the work, it turns out that we need another notion of thingliness, one that can also account for what Heidegger terms the “self-refusal” of the mere thing, its “strange and uncommunicative feature,” its resistance to appropriation.
How did a conceptual opposition like that of form/matter, deriving from an understanding of production, come to so dominate aesthetics and the understanding of being in general? How could it present itself as “the immediately intelligible constitution of every entity”? Heidegger’s answer, that man most immediately grasps what he has made and interprets the rest of being from that basis, is roughly the same as the one he offered in 1927 when he adopted the Greek approach to the understanding of essence and existence for his account of what he termed “the productive comportment of the Dasein.” The Greek tendency to understand being in these terms derived from the inherently reflective character of their thinking, which, based in their way of thinking being from the Dasein, gave their fundamental ontological concepts a “universal significance.” (BP 116). Taking the Dasein’s productive comportment (herstellende-brauchende Verhaltung) as a universal horizon for ontology, and thus for his own project of fundamental ontology, Heidegger essentially adopted the Greek tendency to understand all being, including the “mere thing of nature,” from the notion of production. Of course, this repetition of the Greek notion of production passed by way of a dramatic appropriation of medieval ontology and transcendental philosophy, particularly Kant’s notion of schematism, but the crucial point for our purposes here is that the philosophical tendency he displaces so powerfully in the opening pages of “the Origin of the Work of Art” is precisely the one that undergirded crucial elements of the existential analytic, namely the entire analysis of understanding. When he suggests that the tendency to generalize the productive understanding of being blocks our access to a thought of the thing, he may well be thinking of his own thought of the Dasein’s facticity in the twenties and thirties.
Whether or not we may read an auto-critique in Heidegger’s essay, its pertinence is dramatically evident if we look back to The Basic Problems, and specifically to a passage on art. Late in his development of the concept of world (a discussion that is very closely linked to the discussion of this concept in Being and Time), Heidegger appeals to a passage from Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge to suggest his meaning, arguing that creative literature “is nothing but the elementary emergence into words, the becoming uncovered, of existence as being in the world” (BP 171) I have photocopied the relevant pages for you, and I hope you have had a chance to familiarize yourselves with this remarkable passage from Rilke.4 I have included Heidegger’s accompanying remarks because I want to point to Heidegger’s assertion in the paragraph following the citation that Rilke has not “imagined” what he sees in the wall, but rather interprets and elucidates what is “actually” there. The reference to actuality picks up the discussion of the notion of “existence” that runs throughout the Basic Problems and is implicitly taken up in the opening pages of “The Origin of the Work of Art” when Heidegger argues that we must attend to the “reality,” the Wirklichkeit of art in the art work. But the reader of the art work essay does not need this philosophical reference to hear an echo of Heidegger’s declaration regarding his response to Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes, his assertion that he has not “projected” anything into the work (“If anything is questionable here, it is rather that we experienced too little in the neighborhood of the work and that we expressed the experience too crudely and too literally” [OWA 36/21]). From a rhetorical point of view, at least, these are two very comparable scenes in Heidegger’s text. But what is striking about Heidegger’s use of Rilke’s page for his illustration of his notion of world is the glaring insufficiency of Heidegger’s conceptual framework. The notion of existence in a world that Heidegger finds disclosed in this passage simply does not do justice to it, at least insofar as we understand this notion from everything Heidegger has said about the Dasein’s productive comportment in The Basic Problems. Perhaps the difficulty was not so apparent in 1927, but the reader of “The Origin of the Work of Art” will spot the problem immediately: the notion of existence presented to us does not capture the residue of “life” that prompts anxiety in Rilke’s narrator. Heidegger leaves unaddressed the earthly dimension of “life” from which the narrator flees--an important part of the earthiness to which Heidegger attended in Van Gogh’s portrayal of the peasant shoes.
We might well conclude that Heidegger’s account of existence in The Basic Problems and in Being and Time simply lacked sufficient attention to the material dimension of facticity, that it required something of what Heidegger supplied with the notion of earth in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” But I take Heidegger’s words in the opening pages of this later essay seriously when he suggests that the generalization of the thought of equipmental production blocks access to a thought of the thing and something like the thingliness of the work of art. The problem lies in the notion of production itself and its manner of inducing a subject-centered ontology for any modern thinking. To be sure, Heidegger never installed a human subject at the ground of his fundamental ontology. But an interpretation of the Dasein’s capacity for understanding from the basis of a notion of production that Heidegger found at the heart of the Greek notion of praxis (which he interpreted in relation to the Platonic notion of the good) inevitably led him to an impasse--precisely the impasse that necessitated the turn in his thinking of the early thirties.
We see Heidegger at grips with this fundamental difficulty in precisely the reticence I noted earlier regarding the appeal to a notion of usage. What Heidegger is hesitant about is the human role in artistic creation. The reader of the “The Origin of the Work of Art” cannot help but notice Heidegger’s relative silence regarding the place of the artist in the act of creation; he consistently shies from substantial statements about the human role in the act of poietic creation. The act of “preserving” the work is better explicated than the act of creation, though even here the terms remain somewhat abstract and allusive. Heidegger himself was perfectly aware of this difficulty, as he admits in his Addendum of 1950: “In the heading, ‘the setting-into-work-of-truth,’ in which it remains undecided but decidable who does the setting or in what way it occurs, there is concealed the relation of being and human being, a relation which is unsuitably conceived even in this version--a distressing difficulty, which has been clear to me since Being and Time, and has since been expressed in a variety of versions” (OWA 87/74).
I have marvelled at this statement for many years. What is “the relation of Being and human being” if not one of the fundamental questions of Heidegger’s thought? A distressing difficulty indeed! It also happens to be the relation Heidegger will name “der Brauch” in the later work. In fact, Heidegger’s statement in the Addendum offers a clue in this respect, because in the sentences following the statement I have just cited, Heidegger specifies the proper location of the question and suggests where the thinking that pursues the question will have to turn. “The problematic context that prevails here,” Heidegger writes, “then comes together at the proper place in the discussion, where the nature of language and poetry is touched on, all this again only in regard to the belonging together of Being and Saying.” (OWA 87/74). We are implicitly directed to Heidegger’s writing on language for a development of the crucial question that haunts the art-work essay. And as it happens, we will find such a development in Unterwegs zur Sprache6 : in the essay “Das Wesen der Sprache,” (where Heidegger essentially repeats the art work essay through a discussion of Hölderlin) and in “Der Weg zur Sprache,” where he addresses more fully the human share in the poiesis that is proper to the essence of art as it is described in the earlier art work essay. I cannot review the contributions of these essays on this occasion. The arguments are dense and intricately woven; they are philosophical works in their own right. But I will draw two points from them. The first, which I draw from “Das Wesen der Sprache,” concerns the earth and will serve simply to reiterate the place Heidegger accords to it in his thought on art. In the concluding movements of the essay, Heidegger attempts to make a poetic saying sound from the basis of what he has prepared us to hear in language in the course of his essay. As in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” when he says that the poetic work brings the word to speak (treating the word in its earthly character), he invites us here to attend to the way human language, in its various Mundarten (“modes of the mouth”--”idioms,” perhaps) issues from the “flow and growth of the earth in which we, as mortals, flourish” (US, 194). It is from here that Heidegger invites us to hear Hölderlin’s call for a naming of language itself in its attuned saying of the jointure of the fourfold: “Now, now words for it must emerge like flowers.” Words like flowers--this is the spontaneous forthcoming of the earth, blossoming in the event that Heidegger terms Ereignis.
There is relatively little here about the human role in this event--or little that advances us in regard to the “distressing difficulty” Heidegger noted in his Addendum. Indeed, we are left with a rather enigmatic allusion to the sudden emergence, at the end of this meditation, of the relation between language and death. This relation, he says, may give us a hint as to the manner in which language summons us to itself. But Heidegger does not pursue the hint, and the essay leaves us with the suggestion, explicitly recorded for us in Heidegger’s own notes, that language is “the relation of relations”--a statement that could easily lend itself to the idea that Heidegger has offered language as a kind of foundation.
But in the opening paragraph of “Der Weg zur Sprache,” Heidegger overturns this suggestion by introducing another term in the “relation of relations.” If we undergo an experience with language, he suggests, “then the strangeness of language may appear for us, and our relation to it will appear as the relation” (US, 229). So we are back to the question of the human, and here Heidegger offers one of his farthest reaching statements about the relation of Being and human being. He tells us that Ereignis, the event in which a Saying opens that articulates Being--requires the human in what is proper to it for the very advent of language. Language cannot come about without a co-originary appropriation of the human in its essence. This is the relation Heidegger names “der Brauch”: Ereignis needs and uses the human essence for the event in which language is set into movement. And what is proper to this essence? Heidegger gives no more than an enigmatic hint in a telegraphic footnote: “Lauten und Leiben: Laut und Schrift”: “Sounding and Bodying: Body and Writing” (US 249).
Again, I cannot take the time to explicate these words here. It would take us through a long meditation on the voice and the hand. But I would submit that the reference to a “bodying” carries us back once again to the topic of the earth. To put this in an abbreviated fashion: The human offer a bodily receptivity.
Of course, Heidegger said nothing different in the existential analytic; the Dasein offers a factical site for the articulation of Being, the Da. But as we have seen, Heidegger found that the language of the phenomenological project blocked his access to the earthly dimension of existence. He needed a profound displacement of the human Dasein to free the possibility of thinking it. The thought of usage (der Brauch) effects this displacement and effectively liberates the earth for a thought of human being. This doesn’t mean the task is easy! My own effort to pursue it in recent years has led me, quite unexpectedly, into a study of infancy that communicates with a theme that absorbed Jean-François Lyotard in the last years of his life. (Lyotard attempted, in those years, to think a bodily receptivity to the event under the name of an “unconscious body” or “the body of infancy,” and tried to grasp how this infancy might offer a form of resistance to the technocratic imperatives he named “the inhuman”.) It has also led me back to specific works of art in search of a way of speaking of experience that honors Heidegger’s understanding of what it is to undergo an experience with language or an experience of a painting like that of Van Gogh’s peasant shoes. My thesis is that any retrieval of this term (after the critique to which it has been subjected in accounts of the linguistic or performative construction of reality) must move to the level of thought Heidegger achieves in “Der Weg zur Sprache” when he speaks of an appropriation of the human in usage. Because, at that level, we are thinking the limits of language and engaging the earthly dimension of the event. We are thinking a bodily exposure. Only from there can we think in experience a genuinely uncertain passage (to draw on its etymology, the Latin experire).
But what of the earthly dimension of experience? I have taken a long detour away from “The Origin of the Work of Art” to suggest something of what is at stake in my theme, “the use of the earth.” But I have said little about what the essay offers to us regarding the earth itself. So let me turn back to the essay now, and attempt to offer just a few notes on this recalcitrant motif.
Heidegger tells us that the art work gains its self-subsistence and its thingly actuality from a double movement that is drawn out in the work’s creation and instantiated in the work’s figural composition. Two movements are thus articulated or conjoined as truth is set to work in the work: the setting up (Aufstellung) of world, and the setting forth (Herstellung) of earth. (Herstellung is the word used in The Basic Problems for production.) Neither can be thought apart from the other, and neither is more originary; we know their essential traits only in their relation and in what is required of the artist in an act of creation that must of necessity be initiatory, but immediately reveals itself as response. (Creation, in this account is like an initial tracing that releases what the artist will have been answering to.) Thus, in the setting up of world, the artist is called to trace out a kind of guiding schema, or better, a law of schematization, itself invisible, that determines in one and the same opening the form of the perceptible and the form of a set of existentials (birth and death, blessing and curse, etc.) that Heidegger draws from his earlier work for Being and Time, but also from Heraclitus and other pre-Socratic thinkers and poets. The artist’s act is an offering, Heidegger suggests; the work does not set up a world for the artist. Creation is rather a dedication and praising; it is for the other. Heidegger evokes here a relation to the divine, but I believe we must follow him in saying more generally that the artist serves the event in which the setting up the world and the setting forth of earth is required by Being.
I should note that Heidegger’s silence on the person of the artist is so severe that world and earth appear at moments in this account as almost divine agents in themselves. Heidegger effectively surrenders to a kind of myth-making when he tells us that “The earth cannot dispense with the Open of world if it itself is to appear as earth in the liberated surge of its self-seclusion,” and “The world cannot soar out of the earth’s sight if, as the governing breadth and path of all essential destiny it is to ground itself in a resolute foundation” (OWA 49/35). The inclination to myth, however inflected it might be by a Hölderlinian vocabulary, is a troubling dimension of this essay in light of its historical context. But it is a brief moment, and the essay’s presocratic tones quickly give way to a language of writing and tracing that returns the artistic process to the hands of the artist.
So, to return to the thematics of the earth, Heidegger tells us that the earth requires a setting forth in the manner peculiar to the work of art because earth cannot appear otherwise as earth, namely as what shrinks from disclosure and resists any analytic incursion. What Heidegger terms “the earth” is not “nature,” as it is named in modernity, or a mere material being. It is closer to the Greek physis, though in a sense of this term that accommodates the saying attributed to Heraclitus: “physis kryptestai philei”--“physis loves to hide.” Physis, Heidegger tells us, names an emergence and clearing of things as things, “earth” is the sheltering element in this movement, and, as such, is that on which humankind bases its dwelling. “Earth,” Heidegger writes, “is that whence the arising (physis) brings back and shelters everything without violation” (OWA 42/28). We will note that this constitutes a very uncertain ground for human dwelling.
Thus, only the art work “lets the earth be an earth.” We may seek to capture it by “technical-scientific” means, but every such effort, however forceful and even destructive, “remains an impotence of will.” We can calculate the stone’s weight, Heidegger writes, we cannot capture its burden. Technical calculation, in other words, fails to render that presence of the earth Heidegger attempted to describe in Van Gogh’s painting, that sensible presence that the earth gains as the ground of human dwelling. Heidegger accents strongly the perceptibility of earthly being as it is offered by the play of the art work: colors glow, the word speaks, light shines, and so forth. But this is not an aesthetic relation in the traditional sense. What is given to perception in the artwork is the element, or perhaps, the elements, of existence in a world (if I can use that word as Heidegger does in The Letter on Humanism when he speaks of Being as the element of thought). Art brings forth the earth to which human existence is irreducibly bound, and in a way that offers it as the ground of a possible dwelling. Heidegger’s ambition here is worth underscoring, however expressly it appears in the text; he is arguing that art can restore a form of aisthesis that speaks to human finitude in its earthly dimension. He is seeking a recovery of human experience.
This means, once again, an exposure to uncertainty. The earth, as we have seen, draws back in a sheltering self-seclusion. As das Bergende, it resists the disclosedness of truth thought as aletheia, truth’s Unverborgenheit. If we can properly speak of it as “disclosed” in art, it is as the sheltering in clearing or disclosing. Heidegger speaks, in this respect, of the “unexplained mystery” of the earth, its “uncommunicative” character. He introduces this first by speaking of a withdrawal that is a setting of boundaries. He writes:
The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is by nature undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up. All things of earth, and the earth itself as a whole, flow together into a reciprocal accord. But this confluence is not a blurring of their outlines. Here there flows the stream, restful within itself, of the setting of bounds, which delimits everything present within its presence. Thus in each of the self-secluding things there is the same not-knowing-of-one-another. To set forth the earth means to bring it into the Open as the self-secluding. (OWA, 47/34)
The setting up of a world is perhaps to be thought, in part, as a remarking of these boundaries as boundaries in such a way that they constitute a relation. But in the clearing of a relational context (and truth is precisely such a clearing of beings in their totality), there is still withdrawal and self-seclusion. The earth introduces an irreducible opacity or concealment (Verbergung) that takes two forms. I cite Heidegger again.
Concealment...prevails in the midst of beings in a twofold way. Beings refuse themselves to us down to that one and seemingly least feature which we touch upon most readily when we can say no more of beings than that they are. Concealment as refusal is not simply and only the limit of knowledge in any given circumstance, but the beginning of the clearing of what is lighted. But concealment, though of another sort, to be sure, at the same time also occurs within what is lighted. One being places itself in front of another being, the one helps to hide the other, the former obscures the latter, a few obstruct many, one denies all. Here concealment is not simple refusal. Rather, a being appears, but it presents itself as other than it is. (OWA, 53-54/40)
The first form of concealment seems somehow straightforward; it is the withdrawal of beings Heidegger described in “What is Metaphysics?” in that famous evocation of “the pure night of the Nothing of anxiety.” The withdrawal of being opens the possibility of relation. But the second form is more enigmatic. Heidegger describes it at first almost as a function of perspective: one being hides another. But what does he mean when he says “one denies all”? Is he evoking an idol of some kind? Let us remember that Heidegger had just recently suffered a kind of fascination with the person of Hitler. Might this be linked to what he means when he says that a being presents itself as other than it is? Listen to the succeeding paragraph:
This [second] concealment is dissembling. If one being did not simulate another, we could not make mistakes or act mistakenly in regard to beings; we could not go astray and transgress, and especially could never overreach ourselves. That a being should be able to deceive as semblance is the condition for our being able to be deceived, not conversely. (OWA 54/40)
It is hard not to read these words today and think of Heidegger’s “overreaching” in the time of his Rectorate. But how do we think this play of a dissembling appearance, this deceptive Schein?
Given that we are in the context of art, we cannot avoid a recollection of Plato’s treatment of the relation between truth and art in The Republic, and particularly the long discussion of mimesis in the opening chapters which reveals what is at stake in Plato’s effort to delimit its influence. Mimesis induces a dissolution of limits. It is, in some sense--that is, if we can say “it is”--an undoing of proper determinations (and most critical for Plato, an undoing of proper determinations of character and identity). Heidegger does not shy from acknowledging the danger that Plato tried so hard to exclude from the proper boundaries of the polis--he thinks we must give it its place.
We believe we are at home in the immediate circle of beings. That which is, is familiar, reliable, ordinary. Nevertheless the clearing is pervaded by a constant concealment in the double form of refusal and dissembling. At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary, uncanny. The nature of truth, that is, of unconcealedness, is dominated throughout by a denial. (OWA 54/41)
These are striking words if we give them their weight and pursue their implications for human dwelling. But I want to ask only one question at this point. How is dissemblance of the earth? Is it possible that dissemblance, in the presentation of a self, for example, takes its originary possibility from that earthly receptivity that we saw earlier as proper to that human essence that is used in Ereignis for the advent of truth? Would that receptivity or availability involve a kind of malleability or plasticity, so that human being would lend itself not just to truth, but to that play in truth that makes truth “untruth”?6 The actor is perhaps indulging in what might be considered a very uncanny, but entirely “essential” use of the earth.
I offer this last possibility as no more than a hypothesis. I want to conclude with an observation concerning the use of the earth that is a bit more firmly anchored in Heidegger’s essay. I refer to Heidegger remarks on the figure.
We have seen that the use of the earth in art discloses the earth as earth. Now, what we have just read about dissemblance de-stabilizes this as, rendering it irreducibly figural. Nevertheless, the work is the site of the disclosure of truth. It does not give itself over to figural play or the uncertainty of that earthly being that Tiresias represented for Oedipus; it presents, rather, that truth has happened, and happens here, in the work, in an originary manner. Such a presentation constitutes what Heidegger terms the “createdness” of the work. It inheres, formally, in the manner in which truth is composed in the word’s Gestalt.
I noted that the work does not give itself over to a pure play of figurality. It uses earth in the service of truth (Un-verborgenheit), and in this sense it is almost more on the side of the world than it is on that of the earth. Earth seeks to absorb world in its concealing movements, whereas world seeks openness. The art work seeks to bring earth itself into the open (always as earth), and to show that it has done this. But my words here remain crude, and ultimately we must think the movements of earth and world, in what they contribute to the aletheic movements of clearing and concealing, together. Heidegger does this with his notion of the figure. When the artist draws out the conflictual relation of world and earth, he or she does so by bringing the measure of world and the bounding of earth into a common outline Heidegger terms “the rift” (der Riss). The artist, as I have suggested, re-marks the self-secluding movement of the earth with the guiding schema of the dawning world. This is the tracing of a difference against which and from which all beings may manifest themselves, including the work itself. But if this event of opening the grounding relation is to appear--and it must appear in order to be as truth--then it has to be set back into the grounding earth and set forth with it in the world. It must be re-inscribed in what it allows to emerge. The work thus contains a kind of fold, as Deleuze would say, whereby the use of the earth for the advent of truth shows its own conditions.
Truth establishes itself in a being in such a way, indeed, that this being itself occupies the Open of truth. This occupying, however, can happen only if what is to be brought forth, the rift, entrusts itself to the self-secluding factor that juts up in the Open. The rift must set itself back into the heavy weight of stone, the dumb hardness of wood, the dark glow of colors. As the earth takes the rift back into itself, the rift is first set forth into the Open and thus placed, that is, set, within that which towers up into the Open as self-closing and sheltering.
The strife that is brought into the rift and thus set back into the earth and thus fixed in place is figure, shape, Gestalt. (OWA 63-64/51)
By virtue of this play wherein the work stands forth in and from the event it embodies, the work gains the evidence of its createdness. It figures the ground of its own appearance. Reverberating in a solitary reservedness, it manifests that it is as a work and thereby offers the fact of its event. Speaking formally, we might say that in the work’s strange solitude, it bears difference. But we could not appropriately term this a formal trait, because it is not form that manifests difference, but figure. The trace of the sketched difference between measure and boundary that gives the “basic features of the rise of the lighting of beings” is borne in the earth-bound figure. Or, to put this more precisely, it is articulated in the figure and thereby com-poses itself, fixedly. “Composing” and “articulating” are immensely difficult terms here, since the “jointure” that is effected, what Heidegger calls “the Gefüge,” cannot surrender to any formal calculation. Hölderlin’s words on recovering the mechane of the ancients for modern poetry probably cannot be pertinent here. And what is really meant by “fixing in place”? The figure is irreducibly of the earth. Indeed, Heidegger’s strongest statements about the use of the earth appear in the paragraph immediately following his introduction of the notion of the Gestalt.
In the creation of the word, the conflict, as rift, must be set back into the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth and used as the self-closing factor. This use, however, does not use up or misuse the earth as matter, but rather sets it free to be nothing but itself. (OWA 64/51)
The point is then stressed again as Heidegger describes what he calls the second characteristic of createdness, namely the way the work thrusts before it the simple fact that it is as it draws into its solitary self-subsistence. “Thrusting” and “withdrawing”--these are traits of the earth. So while the work is firmly contained in the composed figure (or “fixed,” as Heidegger says), it is so established in the earth, with all the attendant fluidity and opacity, and an always possible dissimulation.
How are we to think the figure if it is to escape a re-determination in the categories of form and content? How can we understand the implication of this argument, that the earthly figure is not form?
This is a complex question that requires attention to all the specific modalities of artistic creation and their earthly components. But I believe that Heidegger offers a challenging and important path of inquiry when he tries to describe the poetic engagement with the essence of language (on numerous occasions) as the ordering of saying to a rhythmically ordered melos. The Greek “rhusmos,” Heidegger tells us in his commentary on the poetry of Stefan George in Unterwegs zur Sprache, means “Fügung.” The point was made already in commentary on Aristotle’s Physics in 1939 when Heidegger defined rhusmos as “Gliederung, Prägung, Fügung, and Verfassung.” The tracing of the Riss in art, we may conclude, is a drawing into a rhythmic movement. In commentary on Trakl, Heidegger plays with a spurious etymology linking rhusmos with the movement of the seas when he tells us that the source of the poetic swell that surges and recedes at the site of the poem shelters in it the essenceof what metaphysical and aesthetic representation describes as rhythm. He points there to another thought of rhythm (US, 34). But as his remarks on Archilochus and Aeschylus in the seminar on Heraclitus with Eugen Fink indicate, rhusmos must ultimately be thought in relation to Fug.7 And there, if we follow the indications of the famous essay on Anaximander, we meet again a thought of usage. In the oldest fragment on Being, Heidegger says, we learn that order and disorder are conjoined entlang dem Brauch, “according to usage.” Is the appropriation of the human in Ereignis a rhythmic configuration?
Of course, this chain of references only redoubles our initial question. How do we think rhythm outside a metaphysically determined notion of form? And how do we think the rhythmic component of the earthly figure? I leave the question open, but I find it difficult to leave it entirely without noting Heidegger’s own way of leaving it open. His silence on the topic of Hölderlin’s appeal to it is striking (and cannot be an oversight). Is it possible that something in this notion troubled Heidegger? Might it bring forth something of the earth that finally escapes articulation? I am reminded here of Maurice Blanchot’s words in The Writing of the Disaster:
Let us remember Hölderlin: “Everything is rhythm.” [...] How can we understand this? This is not an already ordered totality of the cosmic whose belonging together it would fall to rhythm to maintain. Rhythm is not in accordance with nature, language, or even “art,” in which it seems to predominate. Rhythm is not the simple alternation of Yes and No, of “giving/withdrawing,” of presence/absence, or of living/dying, producing/destroying. Even while it draws forth the multiple whose unity hides, even as it appears regulated and to impose itself according to rule, it menaces this rule for it always exceeds it through a turn that makes it so that wherever it is at play or at work in measure, it still does not find its measure there. The enigma of rhythm...is the extreme danger. That in speaking we should speak in order to make sense of rhythm and render apprehensible and meaningful the rhythm outside meaning--there is the mystery that traverses us and from which we will not free ourselves in revering it as sacred.8
We might conclude that, for Blanchot, it would be precisely the earthly dimension of rhythm--something Blanchot pursued with his notion of the il y a and that led him to the Freudian notion of the death drive in The Writing of the Disaster--that informs Heidegger’s reticence. I won’t try to develop Blanchot’s line of thinking on this occasion, but I point to it in order to underscore again how the question of the figure require a departure from the traditional terms of aesthetics. For the figure, once again, is not “form”--it is irreducibly earthly. And it speaks to us of human finitude. I have tried to suggest that the use of the earth in the art work may tell us something about the use of the human in Ereignis, and thereby about the human itself. We must perhaps rethink the figure if we are to rethink the human. Heidegger tells us near the end of his essay that we only gain access to the thing in its thingliness from the art work. I would add that we perhaps only gain access to the earthly dimension of human finitude via the path of art. But then we must face the question of artistic usage and preservation a bit more consequently than did Heidegger in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and attempt to see what the use of the earth in art reveals to us about the use of the human. We need to follow the artist and dwell longer with the ambiguity that is proper to earthly existence.
Copyright: C. Fynsk
1. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein,” Vol. 39 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1980), 269.
2. I will be citing the English translation by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Citations will appear in the body of the text with the abbreviation “BP.”
3. Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege, Vol. 5 of the Gesamtausgabe, 12. This passage appears on p. 27 of the English translation by Albert Hofstatder in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). Subsequent references will appear in the body of the essay preceded by the abbreviation “OWA.” The first page number cited will refer to the English version, the second to the German.
4. I refer here to pages 170-173 of The Basic Problems. I will cite here only Heidegger’s concluding statement after his long citation of Rilke: “Notice here in how elemental way the world, being in the world—Rilke calls it life—leaps toward us from the things. What Rilke reads here in his sentences from the exposed wall is not imagined into the wall, but, quite to the contrary, the description is possible only as an interpretation and elucidation of what is “actually” in the wall, which leaps forth from it in our natural comportmental relationship to it. Not only is the writer able to see this original world, even though it has been unconsidered and not at all theoretically discovered, but Rilke also understands the philosophical content of the concept of life, which Dilthey had already surmised and which we have formulated with the aid of the concept of existence as being-in-the-world.
5. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Vol. 13 of the Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1985). Cited hereafter in the text with the abbreviation “US.”
6. Here we would meet again, in a surprising fashion, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s work on the Heideggerian treatment of the question of mimesis (see “Typography,” in Typography, ed. C. Fynsk (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989)--surprising, because Heidegger’s thinking would lend itself far more to a thought of the de-stabilizing character of mimesis than Lacoue-Labarthe supposed.
7. Martin Heidegger and Eugen Fink, Heraklit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1970), 91-92.
8. Maurice Blanchot, L’Écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 174-75.
This page was last modified on: Thursday, 16-Nov-2006 17:05:43 GMT
Centre for Modern Thought · School of Language & Literature
University of Aberdeen · King's College · Aberdeen AB24 3UB
Telephone: +44 (0)1224-272625· Fax: +44 (0)1224-272624· Email: Christopher Fynsk c.fynsk@abdn.ac.uk
University
Home · Prospective students
· Prospectuses · A
to Z Index · Search
Email & Telephone Directories · Contacts/Help
· Maps · Privacy
Policy & Disclaimer · Accessibility
Policy