Abstract
In 1905 Wilhelm Dilthey published his famous Das Erlebnis and die Dichtung (Experience and Poetry) in which he tried to show the intrinsic link between lived experience and art, literature and poetry in particular. With Goethe in mind, Dilthey saw poetry as the representation and expression of life. Art, he asserts, is thoroughly “Erlebniskunst” (art of experience).1 But what does this concept in all its ambiguity mean? How can we understand a claim so reminiscent of a romantic conception of art, that is, the unconscious expression of genius? Has art never really been anything more than the authentic expression of the intensity of the artist’s inner life or of the aesthetic pleasure which art-lovers experience? Isn’t the work of art then, in the last analysis, simply the produced or perceived object of a single subjective experience? Or could it be something more, its essence originating elsewhere, beyond the closed sphere of human subjectivity in which artistic creation or aesthetic pleasure is lived? Does art not radically transcend all subjectivity and all lived experience, all Kunsterlebnis (experience of art)? Art seems threatened with its demise when reduced to a lived aesthetic, but has some chance of survival when restored to its proper reign.2
Die Art, wie der Mensch die Kunst erlebt, soil über ihr Wesen Aufschluss geben. Das Erlebnis ist nicht nur für den Kunstgenuss, sondern ebenso für das Kunstschaffen die massgebende Quelk. Alles ist Erlebnis. Doch vielleicht ist Erlebnis das Element, in dem die Kunst stirbt.
Heidegger, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes
The way in which man experiences art is supposed to give information about its nature. Experience is the source that is standard not only for art appreciation and enjoyment, but also for artistic creation. Everything is an experience. Yet perhaps experience is the element in which art dies.
Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”
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Notes
“Poetry is representation and expression of life. It expresses experience and it represents the external reality of life.” See Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis and die Dichtung, 1905. Concerning “Erlebniskunst” (art of experience), cf. H. G. Gadamer, Truth and Method, Barden and Cumming, eds. (New York: Crossroad, 1988), pp. 63 ff.
M. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” (hereafter noted as “OWA”), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), p. 79. Relevant to this theme is also Gadamer’s hermeneutic critique of aesthetic consciousness in the first part of his Truth and Method. cf. also F. W. von Herrmann, Heidegger’s Philosophie der Kunst (Frankfurt on Main: Klostermann, 1980).
Husserl has taught us that the more things seem “selbstverständlich”, selfevident and obvious to us, the more they demand of us a “Selbstverständigung”, comprehension and self-enlightenment.
See Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, § II, and Experience and Judgment, § I and § XI, in which Husserl speaks explicitly of “phänomenologische Ursprungserhellung” (phenomenological elucidation of the origin) by means of which the essence of logic will be uncovered step-by-step.
The question of origin takes, according to Husserl, the form of a “Rückfrage” (inquiry back) into the most original sense of the experience of logic or geometry, or even of a “return to a foundation hidden in meaning” (Sinnesfundament) of our experience of the world; this move should not be confused with the investigation of the historical and empirical genesis of the meaning of cultural formations. cf. “The Origin of Geometry” in The Crisis of European Sciences, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 354. On the noetic and noematic analysis, cf. Ideas I, Part Three, chapters III and IV trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academy Publishers, 1982).
See Mikel Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience,trans. E. Casey and others (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).
See Husserl, Ideas II,trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989) and Ideas I,par. 95.
See OWA pp. 15–88, of which my present essay is a modest re-reading. See also Joseph J. Kockelmans’ masterful Heidegger on Art and Artworks (La Haye: Phaenomenologica 99, 1985).
For the status of “objective ideality” which characterizes cultural objects, see The Origin of Geometry, p. 354. See also Derrida’s commentary dedicated to the cultural world according to Husserl in Derrida’s introduction to the French translation of the text, L’origene de la geometrie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962), pp. 44ff.
See OWA, Epilogue, pp. 79–81. See also Gadamer’s analysis of the limits of the “Erlebniskunst” (art of experience) in Truth and Method, pp. 63ff.
See Heidegger, Nietzsche: The Will to Power as Art. trans. D. Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).
See G. W. F. Hegel, “Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik” in WWX, 1, p. 16, cited by Heidegger in OWA p. 80.
“Historial” is the French rendition of what Heidegger calls geschichtlich, which is used in contrast to historisch. For Heidegger, the term implies history as “destiny,” i.e. the history of Being, which is the profound sense of history (geschicktlich).(Translators’ note).
Especially in Nietzsche.
Heidegger takes up the question formulated by Hegel in 1828–29 in his Lecons sur l’esthetique without pretending to provide the answer which seems to him subordinate to the general question of truth.
Convinced of the fertility of the “hermeneutic circle,” Heidegger judges that the circular path imposed upon us by the question is neither a makeshift nor a defect in thought. See OWA pp. 17–18.
See OWA p. 19.
See OWA pp. 19–20.
See OWA pp. 19–20.
See OWA pp. 26–28.
Perhaps, after all, the work of art issues from this dialectic of “form and matter” which is played beneath the gaze of spectator or listener and for whom the artist would be like the ingenious “director” (metteur en oeuvre ou en scène).Such is the venerable thesis of the traditional aesthetic that Dufrenne recalls with: “the form is the soul of the work of art as the soul is the form of the body.” See Dufrenne, op. cit., v. 1, p. 195.
Would all “Kunstwerk” (Artwork), in the last analysis, be “Handwerk” (craftwork)? Heidegger notes that in Greek the same word, “techne,” designates the artisan’s as well as the artist’s work. See OWA p. 26 and p. 17.
See OWA pp. 39–40
When art serves only a political function, it condemns itself to its own impoverishment, as official art under Nazism, or the “socialist realism” under Stalin, showed. On art and society, see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt; edited by G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
See Jean Baudrillard, Pour une critique de l’economie politique du signe (Paris: Vrin, 1972).
See Paul Valéry, “Eupalinos ou l’architecte,” in Oeuvres. v. H, p. 93.
“The nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.” See OWA p. 36.
See OWA pp. 33–35.
See OWA p. 34.
The debate inaugurated by Meyer-Schapiro concerning the truth of the Heideggerian interpretation of Van Gogh’s work is well known. According to this art historian, it is not a question of poor peasant clogs, but of the painter’s very proper shoes. Derrida takes up the debate by refuting Schapiro’s interpretation which sees in Heidegger’s “commentary” nothing but the expression of an emphatically rural and peasant “ideology.” See Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. G. Bennington and I. McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 255 ff. and especially pp. 276 ff.
See OWA p. 39. Here a detailed analysis of the notion of “Wahrheit” (truth) qua Aletheia such as Heidegger describes would be essential. As space does not allow, I direct the reader to the relevant passages in Heidegger’s essay, OWA p 47 ff., and also to his 1930 essay, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit.
The example of non-representational art amply confirms it. For the argument of art as Mimesis, see the Heideggerian analysis of Platonic theory in Nietzsche.
For a complete description, see OWA p. 43.
See OWA p. 43.
Concerning the Heideggerian “mythology” of Earth (Erde), “die Hervorkommende-Bergende” and of World (Welt),“the self-disclosing openness,” cf. OWA pp. 46 ff. and also the essays, “The Thing” and “…Poetically Man Dwells…” in Poetry, Language, Thought.
See OWA p. 42.
See OWA p. 44. On the Sacred and the divine, cf. Erlduterungen zu Holderlins Dichtung.
See OWA p. 47.
See OWA p. 47.
See OWA p. 46.
“Then art is a becoming and a happening of the truth: all art is a letting-happen of the beginning of the truth of beings as suck” See OWA pp. 51 ff. Concerning the notion of “truth” as “disclosure” and Aletheia see the essay, “Aletheia” in Vortrdge and Aufsatze.
“Just as a work cannot be without being created but is essentially in need of creators, so what is created cannot itself come into being without those who preserve it.” See OWA p. 66.
See OWA p. 71.
See OWA p. 48.
“Art,” writes Heidegger, “is history in the essential sense that it grounds history.” See OWA p. 77.
See OWA pp. 40 ff.
On Art as “Poiesis” (Dichtung), see Arion L. Kelkel, La legende de l’être. Langage et poésie chez Heidegger (Paris: Vrin, 1980). Naturally, see also Kockelmans’ Heidegger, on Art and Art Works.
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Kelkel, A.L. (1994). The Enigma of Art: Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience or Archaeology of the Work of Art?. In: Stapleton, T.J. (eds) The Question of Hermeneutics. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-1160-7_18
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