References
- Gianni Vattimo uses these terms in The End of Modernity, and they are echoed in Ziarek's The Historicity of Experience. For both Vattimo and Ziarek, Kant is the ghost behind the extra-aesthetical significance that art claims in Heidegger. Kant's conception of disinterested contemplation cuts art off from its ontological roots to define it ‘as lacking any practical or cognitive points of reference’ in its exclusive tie ‘to a specific stance assumed by the observer’ (Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Postmodern Culture, Jon R. Snyder trans., Cambridge: Polity Press 1988, p.122, see also Krzysztof Ziarek, The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde and the Event, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press 2001, p.88). Although one of the central themes in Kant's account of aesthetic judgment is that pure taste is exercised against the instrumentalism of use, whether of the cognitive interest that would determine an object's form according to its function or the more venal interests of personal ends, this potential affinity with Heidegger is lost precisely because Kant's doctrine of aesthetic disinterest cuts off the ontological root that would allow this critique of instrumentalism to work outside the quarantined and therefore impotent ‘cultural field’. In this regard, these authors do not just claim a continuous role for art of criticism within the economy of Heidegger's thinking, but exemplify the posture that, since Schiller's interpretation of Kant, sees the arts as the bearer of extra-aesthetical, political significance. This negative interpretation of Kant's influence on Heidegger can be contrasted with Heidegger's own positive account of the Kantian conception of aesthetic disinterest in his Nietzsche lectures (Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, two volumes trans. D. Farrell Krell, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1979, vol. 1, p.110f).
- Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter, New York: Harper & Row 1971 (from now on referred to as OWA in the text), Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, New York: Harper and Row 1977, p. 14; from now on referred to as QCT in the text.
- Krzysztof Ziarek, ‘After Aesthetics: Heidegger and Benjamin on Art and Experience’, in: Philosophy Today, Spring 1997, Vol.41 (1), pp. 201–203.
- Ibid., pp. 201ff.
- Ziarek, ‘Powers to Be: Art and Technology in Heidegger and Foucault’, Research in Phenomenology, 28, 1998, p.179. See also for this use of the metaphor of the mirror to describe the relation between technology and art, Ziarek, After Aesthetics, 201: ‘To the extent that it is poetic, a poiesis, art brings forth the obverse side of experience and its technological regimentation; it discloses the tain of the representational mirror, the other side of the metaphysical Historie—its ‘poetic’ Geschichte.‘
- Kathleen Wright, ‘The Place of the Work of Art in the Age of Technology’ Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22:1 (Spring) 1984, p. 579f.
- Ibid., p. 580.
- Miguel de Beistegui, Thinking with Heidegger: Displacements, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 2003, p. 154.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., pp. 155, 159, 160.
- Ibid., pp. 159 and 167.
- Ibid., pp. 152–160 and Wright, op. cit. 579ff. See also OWA p. 41ff for the discussion of place in the case of the Greek temple. In contrast, Michel Haar's reading of Heidegger's account of technology and art retains their epochal distinction. On the one hand, Haar, like Vattimo and Ziarek, emphasises that Heidegger saves poetry from the contained position it has in formalist and materialist aesthetics (Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, Reginald Lilly, trans., Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1993, p. 112), but on the other he does not go on to name, as Wright does, poetry as the ‘saving power’ for the technological Gestell, but describes this ‘saving power’ in the non-art terms of appropriation (ibid., 89). Dominique Janicaud is sceptical of Heidegger's homogenised view of technological relations. Although he cites Heidegger's description of world in his ‘Origin’ essay to show the perforation points Heidegger's own thought gives for the Gestell, he also cites the event of appropriation in this regard (Dominique Janicaud, Powers of the Rational: Science, Technology and the Future of Thought, Peg Birmingham and Elizabeth Birminghan, trans.,Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1994, p. 184). See also Robert Bernasconi's interpretation of the essay on technology as a continuation of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ lectures. Bernasconi, like Ziarek, emphasises the motive for Heidegger's turn to art for the meditation on technology in the technology essay as the ‘proximity’ or ‘co-belonging’ between art and technology, but also sustains the modal relation Heidegger takes to art's place that I will be emphasising here. See his ‘The Greatness of the Work of Art’, p. 115; and for a critical inflection of the topic of place in the age of technology ‘The fate of the distinction between praxis and poeisis’, p. 16f, both in Robert Bernasconi, Heidegger in Question: The Art of Existing, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1993.
- Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p. 38; from now on referred to as ID in the text.
- See Bernasconi's systematic account of the different versions of this essay, in: op. cit. pp. 99–117.
- Cf: Heidegger's characterisation of man's natural affinity to metaphysics in his The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1995. The precise terms of this rethinking of the question of Being as a problem of presentation can be followed in Heidegger's Kant and Schelling books where Kant is praised for identifying the problem of thinking sensible intuition, but also criticised for tying this problem to the presentation of ideas of reason. In his Schelling book, Heidegger criticises German idealism and romanticism for having suppressed the problem of presentation by subordinating sensible forms to the presentation of the pre-given absolute (Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Stambaugh, Athens: Ohio University Press 1985, p. 35). The historicization of the question of the meaning of being needs to be seen in Heidegger's thinking as the attempt to think present things without the ground of an absolute (as in idealism) or of ideas of reason (as in Kant).
- The ‘translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation’ (OWA 23).
- The exact quote here reads: ‘all immediate experience of beings’ (OWA 31).
- This essay contains a constant dialogue with his discussion of aesthetics in his Nietzsche lectures of the 1930s and particularly his defence of Kant in those lectures. Hence he asks whether this ‘most difficult of tasks’ is so difficult because it is ‘the opposite of the indifference that simply turns its back upon the being itself in favour of an unexamined concept of being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own being’ (OWA 31). It is this difficulty, misunderstood by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer as ‘indifference’, that Heidegger finds in the Kantian doctrine of aesthetic disinterest.
- OWA 36. He continues: ‘This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia. We say ‘truth’ and think little enough in using this word. If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work’.
- OWA 41; ‘Refusal’ may be understood as the structural way for things to be present such that their being is not fully exhausted in the way we relate to them; and ‘dissembling’ as when refusal is not given as a feature of the relation to what is, but in the epochal terms of dissemblance.
- The quality of luminosity in the artwork underlines this interplay of concealing/unconcealing: ‘Colour shines and wants only to shine. When we analyse it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone’ (OWA 47).
- ‘…science is not an original happening of truth, but always the cultivation of a domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. When and insofar as a science passes beyond correctness and goes on to a truth, which means that it arrives at the essential disclosure of what is as such, it is philosophy’ (OWA 62).
- Heidegger indeed moves from thinking aletheia in ‘the Greek way’ as unconcealing to thinking ‘above and beyond’ the Greek aletheia as the opening of self-concealing (On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row 1972, p. 71).
- There are also two examples of poetry used by Heidegger to defeat the conception of art as an accurate depiction of a given thing, Hölderlin's hymn ‘The Rhine’ and C.F. Meyer's poem, ‘Roman Fountain’(OWA 37). We will return to the example of the Hölderlin hymn in the next section.
- In his Nietzsche lectures Heidegger follows Hegel's verdict that modern art is the decline of great art. By this we are not to understand that Hegel denied ‘the possibility that also in the future individual works of art would originate and be esteemed. The fact of such individual works, which exist as works only for the enjoyment of a few sectors of the population, does not speak against Hegel but for him. It is proof that art has lost its power to be the absolute, has lost its absolute power’ (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 85). In this respect Heidegger's criticisms of Wagner's project for a ‘collective work of art’ are instructive, see Nietzsche, vol. I, pp. 85 ff.
- QCT 11; In this account I compress the complicated approach that Heidegger takes to setting out how Gestell is a poiesis. First of all Heidegger emphasises how technology is not a bringing-forth but a challenging (QCT 14); then he qualifies that both Gestell and poiesis are forms of unconcealing (QCT 21); that both have the character of destining (QCT 29); and finally, that Gestell ‘has its origin as a destining in bringing-forth. But at the same time Enframing, in a way characteristic of a destining, blocks poiesis’ (QCT 30). One of the important points of interrelation between this essay and the ‘Origin’ essay is on the theme of truth as concealing/unconcealing. It is a striking feature of the essay on technology that the ordering-revealing threatens Being with oblivion because it drives out the concealing action of the earth. The gesture to the ‘saving power’ of art as the intensifying mystery that counters the revealing of technology is not supported by the necessary account of how art plays, or can continue to play, this role of that which differs from technological ordering. The epochal conception of Being in Heidegger requires that we look elsewhere than art for a ‘saving power’.
- In this respect Heidegger takes the claims of technology more seriously than many of the advocates of the radicalism of the revolution in the hard sciences in the twentieth century. Bachelard's polemic against phenomenology as an ‘epistemological obstacle’ for the understanding of contemporary scientific practice rests on the fact that the ‘object’ of science is no longer a given but a product of scientific procedures and experimentation. The primacy Bachelard gives to experimentation over the ‘given’ is affirmed by Heidegger as the general principle under which the technological Gestell operates. Heidegger attaches to this insight the question as to why the scientific revolution and the techno-scientific Gestell installed by it, happened only in the West? It is this question that allows Heidegger to deepen Bachelard's defence of scientific practice against the philosophical movements, particularly phenomenology, that mistake the constructed nature of the new scientific objects. Heidegger links his account of technology to a specifically historical reflection in which Being is understood as a destining. This reflection is guided by his thinking of the event (Ereignis) which, to say the least, opens up a fault-line in Heidegger's conception of history: on the one hand, he acknowledges that history is a field of contingency and does so on account of the recognition that the emergence of techno-scientific reason is a specifically Western phenomenon. On the other hand, he claims that history is also a destining, a path that is compelled by the history of the thinking of Being. This destining does not mean ‘the inevitableness of an unalterable course’ (QCT 25) where technology would be ‘the fate of our age’. Rather the essence of technology ‘starts man upon the way of that revealing through which the real everywhere, more or less distinctly, becomes standing-reserve’ (QCT 24) but this destining (which is the relation of presentation in which the ‘real everywhere’ is reduced to standing-reserve) is also an ‘open space’ which calls for a reflective relation to this relation of presentation (QCT 25f). In stark contrast to Bachelard then, Heidegger reintroduces the history of philosophy as an explanatory guide for the revolution that, as he concurs with Bachelard, substitutes for classical notions of a given order of experience radically new relations of presentation. These relations are historicized as contingent, singular forms of presentation that are also the historical outcome of a particular destining of Being. It is this aspect of Heidegger's thinking which reserves a fundamental and crucial place for the task of a rigorous re-thinking of the history of philosophy, and especially the original distortion of metaphysics with the Greeks. In this context, interpreting Heidegger's later texts as if they were poetry suppresses precisely this thread that, in Pöggeler's words, connects ‘Heidegger to time-based philosophical issues…’ (Otto Pöggeler, The Paths of Heidegger's Life and Thought, John Bailiff trans., Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press 1997, p. 113).
- ‘The forester who, in the wood, measures the felled timber and to all appearances walks the same forest path in the same way as did his grandfather is today commanded by profit-making in the lumber industry, whether he knows it or not. He is made subordinate to the orderability of cellulose, which for its part is challenged forth by the need for paper, which is then delivered to newspapers and illustrated magazines. The latter, in their turn, set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand’ (QCT 18).
- On Time and Being, p. 53.
- As Jay Bernstein comments, this use of Hölderlin's poem is an aesthetic use of art: ‘Of course, Heidegger can read a poet like Hölderlin and find in him a representation of the contrast between an age in which the gods were still active and our age in which they have fled, a contrast between a dwelling place and abstract space, between unconcealment and truth, but in so far as these or analogous accounts are offered art remains aesthetic: an imaginative projection of other possibilities of thinking experience’ (Jay Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 115). Bernstein is critical of what he calls Heidegger's ‘agnosticism’ regarding art's critical capacity. This criticism is motivated by the loss entailed by Heidegger's departure from the earlier extra-aesthetical work of the artwork in the ‘Origin’ essay. In effect, Bernstein wishes to sustain art in the role of an interrogative alternative to technical, progressive culture. To make up the gap between this work of the artwork and Heidegger's later account of technology he turns away from Heidegger to Adorno. My argument here endorses Bernstein's interpretation of the place of art in Heidegger. However, unlike Bernstein, I hope to show that when art is given the role of a counterforce to technical, progressive culture it is thereby overburdened. It is worth recalling in this regard how Heidegger identifies in Nietzsche the pursuit of art as a counter-movement to nihilism (Nietzsche, vol. I, p. 90) and sees in this pursuit the fallacy of a commitment to ‘values’. Given the complexity of Heidegger's relation to Nietzsche and his own desire for a ‘new beginning’, i.e. the very beginning Nietzsche was unable to provide, defenders of the thesis of art's exceptionalism in Heidegger need to show why he would uncritically return to this past project.
- Heidegger had hoped to fulfil this project in a new addition to the ‘Origin’ essay in which the works of Paul Klee were to be discussed. For an account of the sources of this uncompleted addition see Pöggeler, op. cit., p. 208f.
- There is much that could be said concerning Heidegger's understanding of technology and its relation to movements critical of classical philosophy of science. Where he stands out from the innovative approach to the philosophy of science taken by thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard is that these exponents of a radical new break in the practice and conceptual basis of 20th Century science would be seen by Heidegger to forget the groundlessness of any science. Hence even while Heidegger does understand the fundamental alteration that 20th Century mathematical physics makes to the category of the equipmental, he remains contemptuous (if this is not too strong a word) of the failure of scientific practice to understand the Abgrund, the contingency or absurdity of our failure to coincide with the earth. Heidegger's polarity of world and earth is used to emphasise that we ultimately have no hold on things; that the way we present things does not hold on to their brute ‘thereness’. It is outside the scope of this paper to explore in what respect the ‘fourfold’ comes to replace the world-earth schema as the context of truth happening.
- ID 38: ‘The appropriation appropriates man and Being to their essential togetherness. In the frame, we glimpse a first, oppressing flash of the appropriation. The frame constitutes the active nature of the modern world of technology. In the frame we witness a belonging together of man and Being in which the letting belong first determines the manner of the ‘together’ and its unity.’
- See ‘Technik und Kunst—Ge-stell’ in Kunst und Technik, ed. Walter Biemel and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Frankfurt: Klostermann 1989, p. xiii f.