Eric Champion wrote:
>I admit to having trouble reconciling the individual experience of art with
>that of a nation.
>Perhaps it is the individual's encounter with the work in the realm of the
>individual's personally
>perceived notion of the cultural background of his/her 'people', but it is
>still not clear to me.
>
>My big question is: from Heidegger's point of view, when does the work of art
>(say an ancient Greek
>sculpture by Socrates) become a work of art, when it reveals itself in terms
>of what it will be to
>the maker (Socrates), when it is made and then reveals itself in its own
>making to its maker, when
>it is encountered by an Athenian spectator, when the society of the maker
>(Socrates Athens)
>encounters it, then learns it was made by Socrates, when we encounter it two
>thousand years later,
>or when we find out who made it?
A tangled matrix of questioning here. The issue of how the artwork brings
forth a people is, I think, nested in Heid.'s phenomenology of the Greek
temple, where the temple gathers the manifold paths of birth and death,
disaster and blessing, etc. He is essentially describing religious rituals
through which the community comes to understand itself and negotiate its
relationship with Being. It is only through the e-recting of the
temple-work that the community comes into being, and not vice versa
('umgekehrt'!) In this way, I think this motif from Ursprung des Kunstwerks
resonates with Hegel's phenomenology of 'art-religion' in _Phenomenology of
Spirit_. The shape of Greek consciousness is stamped or minted by its
collective self-identification with the gods, wherein the divine is
encountered essentially as self-manifestation in and through the plastic
artwork. For Heidegger, the statue of the god at the heart of the temple
organizes and opens up the space of worship, which comes to pass in tandem
with the essential mystery of divine manifestation, its withdrawal from
presence. Besides the temple, it should be noted that Heid. privileges
Greek Dichtung in many ways -- Homer, Pindar, Sophocles all 'give the word'
to Greek Dasein.
Where we moderns (we Germans, we Hesperians) stand vis-a-vis the
institutive disclosure proper to the artwork is an open question in this
text. It is fruitful to read Ursprung... alongside "Hoelderlin and the
Essence of Poetry", composed almost simultaneously, where Heid. summarizes
many of the principal themes from the 1934 lectures on Hoelderlin's Hymns:
Germania and the Rhine. Here Heidegger also argues in greater detail for
the primordiality of poetry and of poesy, as the essentially linguistic
work (don't forget: language is the house of Being).
The important word here is, I think, *stiften* -- poetry institutes, gives
rise to institutions which order and give meaning to everyday existentiell
life. Modernity crucially lacks such instituting -- the gods have flown, as
it were -- and Heidegger's great hope during this period, quite explicitly,
is for the German Volk to heed the word of Hoelderlin, whose stiftende
Dichtung poetizes the German people as a call from the past (the Hellenic
source) into the future (the other beginning).
As the early 1940's spiral towards catastrophe, Heid's lectures on
Hoelderlin take on a more 'global' characteristic, however, with a subtle
displacement of German Dasein in favour of Mensch as such (who, it becomes
clearer, is subject to the planetary sway of technology). The epochality of
Being creeps into the texts in question, beginning in some contested
passages in OWA where art becomes a profoundly historical question -- I'm
thinking in particular of the section on world-withdrawal and world-decay,
and also of the concluding remarks on Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics
(specifically, the Hegelian theme of the end of art).
Recent research by Jacques Taminiaux and Robert Bernasconi investigates the
historical and political stakes of the artwork essay; I recommend this work
highly. Taminiaux's piece is in _Poetics, Speculation, Judgment_;
Bernasconi's essays on OWA are in his recent _Heidegger in Question_ (soon
to be reissued in paper by Humanities Press).
Best regards,
Paul N. Murphy
University of Toronto
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
>I admit to having trouble reconciling the individual experience of art with
>that of a nation.
>Perhaps it is the individual's encounter with the work in the realm of the
>individual's personally
>perceived notion of the cultural background of his/her 'people', but it is
>still not clear to me.
>
>My big question is: from Heidegger's point of view, when does the work of art
>(say an ancient Greek
>sculpture by Socrates) become a work of art, when it reveals itself in terms
>of what it will be to
>the maker (Socrates), when it is made and then reveals itself in its own
>making to its maker, when
>it is encountered by an Athenian spectator, when the society of the maker
>(Socrates Athens)
>encounters it, then learns it was made by Socrates, when we encounter it two
>thousand years later,
>or when we find out who made it?
A tangled matrix of questioning here. The issue of how the artwork brings
forth a people is, I think, nested in Heid.'s phenomenology of the Greek
temple, where the temple gathers the manifold paths of birth and death,
disaster and blessing, etc. He is essentially describing religious rituals
through which the community comes to understand itself and negotiate its
relationship with Being. It is only through the e-recting of the
temple-work that the community comes into being, and not vice versa
('umgekehrt'!) In this way, I think this motif from Ursprung des Kunstwerks
resonates with Hegel's phenomenology of 'art-religion' in _Phenomenology of
Spirit_. The shape of Greek consciousness is stamped or minted by its
collective self-identification with the gods, wherein the divine is
encountered essentially as self-manifestation in and through the plastic
artwork. For Heidegger, the statue of the god at the heart of the temple
organizes and opens up the space of worship, which comes to pass in tandem
with the essential mystery of divine manifestation, its withdrawal from
presence. Besides the temple, it should be noted that Heid. privileges
Greek Dichtung in many ways -- Homer, Pindar, Sophocles all 'give the word'
to Greek Dasein.
Where we moderns (we Germans, we Hesperians) stand vis-a-vis the
institutive disclosure proper to the artwork is an open question in this
text. It is fruitful to read Ursprung... alongside "Hoelderlin and the
Essence of Poetry", composed almost simultaneously, where Heid. summarizes
many of the principal themes from the 1934 lectures on Hoelderlin's Hymns:
Germania and the Rhine. Here Heidegger also argues in greater detail for
the primordiality of poetry and of poesy, as the essentially linguistic
work (don't forget: language is the house of Being).
The important word here is, I think, *stiften* -- poetry institutes, gives
rise to institutions which order and give meaning to everyday existentiell
life. Modernity crucially lacks such instituting -- the gods have flown, as
it were -- and Heidegger's great hope during this period, quite explicitly,
is for the German Volk to heed the word of Hoelderlin, whose stiftende
Dichtung poetizes the German people as a call from the past (the Hellenic
source) into the future (the other beginning).
As the early 1940's spiral towards catastrophe, Heid's lectures on
Hoelderlin take on a more 'global' characteristic, however, with a subtle
displacement of German Dasein in favour of Mensch as such (who, it becomes
clearer, is subject to the planetary sway of technology). The epochality of
Being creeps into the texts in question, beginning in some contested
passages in OWA where art becomes a profoundly historical question -- I'm
thinking in particular of the section on world-withdrawal and world-decay,
and also of the concluding remarks on Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics
(specifically, the Hegelian theme of the end of art).
Recent research by Jacques Taminiaux and Robert Bernasconi investigates the
historical and political stakes of the artwork essay; I recommend this work
highly. Taminiaux's piece is in _Poetics, Speculation, Judgment_;
Bernasconi's essays on OWA are in his recent _Heidegger in Question_ (soon
to be reissued in paper by Humanities Press).
Best regards,
Paul N. Murphy
University of Toronto
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---