English Draft Version
(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.
