Abstract
Professor Max Charlesworth and I worked, at Deakin University, on a course, 'Understanding Art'. Max was interested in the Social History of Art and in art as: 'giving form to mere matter'. Here 'form' might be read as 'lucid', 'exemplary', 'beautiful' etcetera. I am an Aristotle Poetics 4 man '… imitating something with the utmost veracity in a picture', and an Aristotle and John Cage man: 'Art is the imitation of nature in the manner of operation. Or a net'. (Cage) (See Aristotle Meteorologica, 381b Book iv.) I was invited by the University of Melbourne to lecture on The Philosophy of Art, which I did for five delightful years. There I included the Heidegger essay, giving it as favourable a reading as I could. Unfortunately I have mislaid my marked-up copy and was forced to re-visit the essay, cold. My new reading lacks - in most respects - my former geniality. Kant's Aesthetic Ideas give us more than Heidegger does. So: I stuck with Aristotle, Cage and Kant.
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Notes
The translation of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ is by Albert Hofstadter; it appeared originally in Poetry, Language Thought, New York, Harper & Row, 1971. I once had the opportunity of talking about the difficulties of Heidegger’s text with Professor Hofstadter at the University of California. He said that even for a native speaker Heidegger’s language is not easy. As a person with little German I have to rely on translation. (I have visited Germany only once.) I have not – nor shall – read all of Heidegger. My interest in this essay is simply that of a student of aesthetics. Text cited is from: Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings ed. David Farrell Krell, London & New York, Routledge, 1993. Epigraph p.168.
See p. 151 ed. cit. The exfoliation of this would require another paper.
Middlemarch, George Eliot, Vintage ed. Random House, London, 2007, p. 20.
Basic Writings, p. 142. Earth and ‘the creative strife of world and earth’ cannot be dealt with here.
For Anselm Kiefer see Anselm Kiefer, texts by Massino Cacciari and Germono Celant, catalogue of Venezia Contemparaneo, Milano, Charta, 1997. The cover Sternbild, Star Picture, shows a prone male figure eyes closed, facing the stars. One recalls the two things which struck awe into Kant, ‘The Starry Heavens above, and the Moral Law within’. Critique of Practical Reason ‘Conclusion’, 313: cf Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, and other works on The Theory of Ethics, trans. Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, London (etc) Longmans Greens and Co 1873, 1954, p. 260. On p. 165 of the Venice catalogue of Kiefer is a small image of Martin Heidegger.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty: Über Gewiβheit, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1969. One is rereading Wittgenstein On Certainty in the light of The Third Wittgenstein the Post-Investigation Works ed. Danièle Moyal-Sharrock, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2004. I am indebted to my friend G.D. Marshall for rekindling my interest in Wittgenstein by the loan of the Moyal-Sharrock book.
Infans: See ‘Fiction in the Act of Speech Itself’, in AULLA XX Proceedings, University of Newcastle, New South Wales, 30 Jan., 5 Feb. 1980, pp. 83–95. (Australasian Universities, Language & Literature Association)
‘Language, by naming beings for the first time first brings beings to word and appearance’ (p.198). The idea in Heidegger sparked off my notion of ‘becoming infans’. It all depends on the sense of ‘first’. Was it the first in Old High German or in Old English? Or just the first for any speaker of a natural language? The remark ‘Language itself is poetry in the essential sense’ (p. 99) sounds like Coleridge’s ‘language is dead metaphor’, but Heidegger goes deeper. ‘…language is the happening in which beings first disclose themselves to man as beings,’ [Wittgentein just might agree with this], [so] poesy – or poetry in the narrow sense – is the most original form of poetry in its essential sense. Language is not poetry because it is the primal poesy; rather poesy propriates in language because language preserves the original essence of poetry’ (p. 199, Italic added).
Since the essence of poetry is its semantic ambivalence (see Empson and Co.), primal naming seems to be for Heidegger more moody than it is exact, a process-of-revealing the is of this such-and-such. What Heidegger goes on to say in a later paragraph one almost wants to save for future use: ‘The essence of art is poetry’ (p. 199 last para.). Here one wants to use it in one – genial – reading as something like this ‘art, the work is poetry in that “poetic” over-rich-description both highlights the being-here of some thing (e.g. a pair of boots), and the enworlding of the boots in the almost short-story which they provide’.
What Heidegger calls ‘the naming power of the word’ (p. 171) might – just might – suggest that: a thing named is a thing revealed. Elemental cultures one much concerned with the power of naming, and there might be trans-cultural reasons for holding that a thing named is a thing revealed, both in itself (internal relations) and in the world (external relations with the namer and hir culture).
Betjemantie, see John Betjeman’s Collected Poems. Compiled with an Introduction by Lord Birkenhead, London, John Murray, 1958.
Betjeman, op. cit. ‘May-Day Song for North Oxford’, pp. 118 ff.
Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus, p.b. Virago, 2004, p. 68.
All this is wrenched from a context in which Heidegger is extricating his own notion of thing from three – he thinks a wrong – notions. As he does not number the 3, but simply writes on and on one is not quite sure of the status of one’s quotations. James Joyce demanded ‘A lifetime’s attention to one of my sentences’. ‘We have not world enough or time’ for either Heidegger or Joyce at that level of consideration.
There was a student auditing my lectures on the philosophy of art who more than once accosted me afterwards with the question, ‘But what of Being?’ My testy response was, ‘There is too much of it: one is tripping over it all the time’. If Being is taken as a would-be-name for the totality (unsummable) of beings, and this is the simplest reading, then most beings come more or less un-concealed. The non-testy answer would be something from a Neo-Scholastic primer: ‘Being is that which exists or is at least capable of existing… Or, considering its relation to its opposite we might say that “Being is that which is not absolute nothingness”. Or, considering its relation to our minds we might say that, “Being is whatever is thinkable, whatever can be an object of thought” ’. And the ‘predication’ of Being is – and needs to be – analogical. The quotation marks around ‘predication’ are there in deference to those who ask: ‘Is existence a predicate?’ A question into which we shall not go here. On the idea of Being, ‘It is poorest in intension and widest in extension’. See, Ontology or the Theory of Being, an Introduction to General Metaphysics, by P. Coffey, London, Longmans Green, 1914, pp. 35–36. Things in Being: Heidegger seems to want the majority of beings to be like nuggets of gold, dug for and dug up. The gold nib of my pen was prospected for: but when the pen was bought the alithēa of the nib came at the sharp end of the pen. I do not need to prospect for my Parker 51: even when it is misplaced and lost, it is not concealed in any philosophically interesting sense. Before I uncapped the pen the nib had been revealed by and to employees of the Parker Pen Co.
The city of Athens has in it a University in Classical style by an Architect who was not Greek.
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Hutchings, P. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’: Heidegger. SOPHIA 51, 465–478 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0306-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-012-0306-4