The Role of the Artist in Modern Society with Particular Reference to Martin Heidegger’s Conceptions of Art and Technology
Introduction
I’m very gratified at the range of fine poems and essays that people have submitted to letteR, including those on the theme of The Role of the Artist in Society.
The subjects of the poems and essays include psychological approaches to artists and their creations; poetry based on mythology; poems on love; poems on how we use language; poetry as the expression of one’s sense of inwardness and individuality; poems on aging and temporality; poems on nature and the poet as poet of nature; poems which describe the aspiration for social justice and decry injustice; poems and essays on the role of the life experience of the poet in poetry, poetry as epic poetry, as reflecting its historical epoch. While not religious in the conventional sense of the word, the poems certainly express spirituality in terms of the poets’ feeling of connectedness with the natural world, and the beings in it.
I’ve written the following essay on the topic of The Role of the Artist in Modern Society, hoping that it will stimulate peoples’ creative imaginations toward aspects of poetry that they may not have seriously considered. This involves two distinct, yet, joined-at-the-hip issues -- the role of technology in our age, and the philosophical aspects of artistic creation as presented by Martin Heidegger in his collection of essays, gathered in the book Poetry, Language, Thought (1971).
Entering 21st Century America: The Technological Revolution Continues
The poet chronicles the human condition. The question still arises, what is unique about poetry and the act of writing, in this age, the 21st century?
As the environment, human perception, and the very physicality and organic nature of human beings is transformed through science, how does the individual as artist confront these new realities?. Historically, in terms of the arts, we’ve moved from classicism to romanticism, to modernism and to post-modernism. We may still be living in a post-modern society in which fixed meaning of conventions are breaking down, as attitudes on religion and sexuality. But technology becomes ever more pervasive, even as it’s absorbed into capitalism.
In the US, and the Western world, people live in a high tech age of male and female freelancers, part-time workers with no benefits, full-time workers with few benefits, framed at both generational ends, by aging hippies and young 20 somethings, who see themselves not as company men but as male and female entrepreneurs, or retired entrepreneurs, in spirit, if not in practice. We live in an age of do your own thing, but with cell phones and IPODS; an age of go back to the land, but with high tech windmills and solar power, and one’s high tech personal devices.
This technology is often distributed along class lines, particularly during the present world economic crisis. So, people struggle to keep their personal devices, even as families get squeezed into one or two rooms in motels, unable to afford security deposits. Close to one adult in five, and one child in ten in the US has no health insurance. <1> In terms of unemployment, privation and housing, the US has become very much like a third world nation, as one reads the daily press, on the web.
But, resuming the main thread of our narrative, we are organic beings in close proximity to all kinds of technology, including various implants and monitoring devices. But increasingly, we become ever more wired and wirelessly connected to technology, which increasingly absorbs the organic, both literally and figuratively. Some of this we take for granted, in the same open way that we accept new digitized sounds. Indeed, technology has changed much of art and music -- graphic arts, photography, synthesized music have become new forms of art, not bastard offspring of a “pure” art. Opera has been reaching new audiences through huge multiplexed screens in movie theatres for probably ten years now, and more recently is streamed live, online. Services like Questia and Rhapsody provide digitized books and music through low priced flat rate subscription service, almost like libraries in the sky.
How should we as poets and artists respond to ever new developments in technology, increasingly affecting human beings themselves?
Electrodes implants in the brain already allow paralyzed people to operate computer mice, or vision impaired people to see through lenses implanted in the skull, which involve digitized images, different than simple “analog” eyeglasses.
Could mechanical implants enable people to perceive multiple scenes simultaneously, like multiple video screens, which would be the ultimate in multitasking?
Does anyone doubt that modern versions of Frankenstein are being played out in secret or not-so-secret labs all over the world …biological beings being created, perhaps through stem cells, with multiple types of mechanical implants, genetically and mechanically re-engineered, perhaps with genetic characteristics of animals or plants? Could we call this being human? What would such a being call us? Who would be master and who would be slave, or would this hybrid being have what we now, perhaps, anachronistically term “human rights?” In the popular culture, films like AI have already presented such issues to us.
Ultimately, we come to this scenario: if the brain functions like hardware, and consciousness like software, people might be able to conquer biological death, through a kind of file sharing of their uploaded consciousness. Then consciousness, in some kind of digitized, genetically modified, and nano-ized, form could be uploaded to new bodies or terminals. This would certainly give poets, writers and artists of all sort, something to think about, would it not? <1>. Indeed, it has, and will continue to stimulate creative vision. The Matrix Trilogy is one vision, AI is another account of humankind’s possible evolution, and Minority Report is right around the corner. Lurking around that corner too, we might find the Universal Soldier, the Terminator, and Predator etc, etc.
Will human beings ever be able to totally control their destiny, no longer leaving things to chance, to predators, or to …aging and death? Then, it would appear that human have passed from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. One could certainly imagine future situations along this line, in which people still retain independent existence as physical being, unlike those portrayed in the Matrix Trilogy. Yet, even non-organic beings with consciousness, might long for rest, to close their eyes, or shut down all their terminals, and free themselves from unending consciousness (even commercial free), and cease to endure eons under a constellation of identities, let alone a single fixed identity (which sounds pretty boring?!) , as we humans experience it now.
As in the Matrix trilogy, people might want to be unplugged from such an unending perceptual field. Freedom would become release from technology and a restoration to the natural world and the organic, as in the trilogy, as well. As quickly as people learned to turn on the TV, for instance, so slowly have they learned to turn it off. While easing some forms of social isolation, technology engenders new forms of alienation, such as computer technology itself.
Positive Application of Technology
With more mundane applications, is there not a right and wrong way to use technology, which would also have a philosophical basis, and a relationship to poetry and the arts as well? The corresponding ecological questions are – does the technology support sustainability, whether it be large or small scale? And, is the technology humane, not hurtful to other living being, and does it enhance human relationships or particular tasks, or lead to exploitation and oppression of other living beings?
In sustainable agriculture, there would be a return to the traditional practice of cows grazing on grass, which produces manure to fertilize the soil, with periodic years of fallowness. This process could continue for many, many years. This is still done in Argentina, on a wide scale. But it is true on a small scale too. Thus, a very small farmer who feds their cattle corn in feed lots and who uses artificial fertilizers on the grass, and who dumps the manure from the feedlot in a waste site or water, would be practicing very poor sustainability, which would also be an incorrect use of technology. On a large scale, this lack of ecological practice has dire implications, including the creation of Dead Zones in the sea due, to fertilizer spilloff and manure accumulations, etc. etc.
Heidegger and Technology
Heidegger writes in Poetry, Language, Thought that through immediacy and directness of interaction, we overcome ordinary dualism between subject and object. At the very meeting or juncture point between ourselves as the subject, and the world as other, is language and art. Heidegger is helpful in his presentation of the positive and negative uses of technology, as it affects the interaction between people and nature.
In language reminiscent of Marx, Heidegger decries the commercialization of art. He presents these thoughts in the context of his analysis of Rilke’s long poem, the Book of Hours.
"In place of all the world-content of things that was formerly perceived and used to grant freely of itself, the object- character of technological dominion spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely. Not only does it establish all things as producible in the process of production; it also delivers the products of production by means of the market. In self-assertive production, the humanness of man and the thing-ness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which not only spans the whole earth as a world market, but also, as the will to will, trades in the nature of Being and thus subjects all beings to the trade of a calculation that dominates most tenaciously in those areas where there is no need of numbers." <Ibid., from the essay, What Are Poets For, pp 114-15>
Technology and art are not necessarily antithetical. The production of art may certainly involve money and technology, for Heidegger, but the artist’s process of creation and intimacy with the product keeps the use value of the object at the forefront. Art, for Heidegger is a work of art, in the sense that it is a product that is worked upon by an artist. As it is worked upon, the essence of the piece is revealed– so the sculpture reveals the essence of the marble through the techne of the sculptor. Thus, for Heidegger, techne is not technique but a bringing forth of what lies concealed, which he also described as the Open and as the Unconcealed. In another essay, he describes the Clearing as that encounter with the immediacy of the other, or Being, which is also the source of language and art. These are descriptions of immediacy, of a feeling or oneness or connectedness with the work of art, as experienced by the artist, or the viewer, as participants in the experience of art. As we develop, Heidegger ties this experience of immediacy with the object as other, to what is true, in the sense of what is authenticity and basic to human experience. We’ll present some quotations on this in the body of this essay, and some additional quotations in Appendices 1 and 2.. On techne, Heidegger writes as follows:
"The word techne denotes a mode of knowing. To know means to have seen, in the widest sense of seeing, which means to apprehend what is present, as such. For Greek thought the nature of knowing consists in aletheia, that is, in the uncovering of beings. It supports and guides all comportment toward beings. Techne, as knowledge experienced in the Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings in that it brings forth present beings as such beings out of concealedness and specifically into the unconcealedness of their appearance; techne never signifies the action of making." <Ibid., from the essay, The Origin of the Work of Art p. 59> (Also see Appendix 4 which includes some comparisons of Heidegger with Aristotle and Plato on the concept of form in the work of art).
We’ll return to techne shortly and give some examples of Heidegger’s approach to artistic creation, after we’ve spoken a little about phenomenology, his philosophical method.
Heidegger and Phenomenological Method
Heidegger’s basic method is phenomenological. Phenomenology is a philosophical movement and a two-fold approach to experience, which was developed in the late 19th century Germany. The person in general, or the artist, looks at things, steps back and then reconstitutes or reconstructs things. There is a field of possibilities, the horizon, which shifts, as the reconstitution process proceeds. The original method of phenomenology developed by Edmund Husserl, Heidegger’s teacher, focuses on reason as that faculty which engages in the phenomenological inquiry. Heidegger also brings the affective realm of sensation, as well as imagination and empathy, into the very heart of his philosophy of art… which becomes both a phenomenology of art, and an artistic approach to phenomenology. He doesn’t relegate these to the realm of the merely subjective, but believes that he is describing the nature of artistic experience in relationship to language and to the object or other.
People confront otherness in the world, which philosophically is the source of alienation between subject and object of experience, or between beings and Being, (In its traditional philosophical sense, Being means existence, or the totality of what is). The world eludes us, or slips away from our perception, even as we seek to perceive it, like the receding horizon in the phenomenological method. So, we seek to withdraw from it, and then reconstitute the world or reconstruct our experience. This, once again, is the twofold method of phenomenology. Phenomenology is a method of exploring the possibilities of an experience, to re-think it, and to re-approach it with new insight. Phenomenology could be used as a way establishing or re-establishing a feeling of intimacy with a particular work or object.
Heideggerian Phenomenology in the News
Phenomenology has been in the news lately, in a well known legal case involving artists and technology, currently still in progress. The legal issue is the right of the artist to follow creative impulses while acknowledging the role the works of other artists in his or her work. Shepard Fairey, a graphics artist, used a particular photo as the basis of his now famous iconic portrait of President Obama. He didn’t conceal this fact and acknowledged AP as the source for his work. It turned out that a particular photographer named Mannie Garcia demonstrated that his was the original photograph. The legal issue is whether Fairy needed to get Garcia’s permission to use his (Garcia's) work as the basis for his own, and whether he owes Garcia any royalties. This type of issue has apparently, gone back and forth in the courts.
My point here is that Fairey has said in at least one interview (with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, NPR) that he likes Heidegger’s use of phenomenology. Fairey’s method of work -- embellishing and or otherwise reconstructing and re-working images does sound very phenomenological. That he chose the right photograph to rework, and that he did this in such a compelling way, sounds Heideggerian, in that the artist successfully conveyed to the viewer a sense of immediacy and intimacy with the photo. Despite the technological nature of the process, it does seem that Fairey’s work fits in with Heidegger’s conception of techne, as described earlier. And so, here, in this modern situation, the issue of the relationship between technology and art comes up.
Phenomenology as the Uncovering of Truth Through Language and Art
As we’ve described, Heidegger combines phenomenological analysis with techne, viewing the sense of immediacy with the other as the basis of art. Heidegger describes a cloak in terms of the special closeness a person might feel for it, as with an object of art. He also examines a very famous painting in this connection, Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes. He describes the shoes as a kind of partner to the person, having the marks of wear, and the person’s own indentation. People personalize and invest with meaning, objects close to them, and draw them into a circle of intimacy.(Martin Buber, a contemporary of Heidegger, calls this the I-Thou relation.)<3> These need not be hand crafted non-technological items, however.
In the modern age, people invest technology with their personal imprint – think of screensavers, ring-tones, computers in colors with patterns chosen by individuals, and low-tech things like personalized vehicle license plates. People personalize all sorts of things, often by naming them, as cars and boats. We give pet names to each other, as well as “regular” names, and we give pet names to our pets, in addition to their “regular” names!
Let’s continue to explore Heidegger’s conception of the art work as the process and product of techne, and as a revealing of truth. People seek truth in the connection between themselves and the world, or between being and Being. There seems to be two movements at play – that of concealment and unconcealment, as expressed through the craftsmanship. Truth is won – art as craft, as techne. Without the work of art, truth would remain hidden, concealed, much as the sculpture remains hidden within the block of marble when it is unworked.
Art is an expression of truth, what Heidegger calls the Open. In a certain way, the artist is like the priest or magician, a bringer forth of light out of darkness, expresser of the Clearing and the Open. The artist mines the Rift in things, which is not unlike the horizon of the phenomenological process of pulling back and reconstituting or reconstructing experience, which is unceasing, like walking toward the horizon, and which forever eludes us (even if we become hybrid human-techno beings). The horizon presumably eludes all beings except God, who, by definition, perceives sub specie aeternatis, under the aspect of eternity.
I’ve placed some quotations from The Origin of the Work of Art in Appendix 1 on the origin of language and poetry.
Some Brief Comparisons – Heidegger, Aristotle and Martin Buber on Art
Heidegger emphasizes activity or praxis by the artist. In other words, as it is brought into being through the activity of being worked upon, the work of art, may change, as originally conceived by the artist. Two interesting philosophical comparisons could be made between Heidegger’s conception of techne and art, and concepts from Aristotle and Martin Buber.
We could say that the form inheres in the object for Heidegger, as it does for Aristotle. Aristotle also considers the form of an object, which inheres within it as the expression of actuality, in contrast to potentiality. According to Aristotle, (see his Metaphysics ) there are four kinds of causality: the physical substance of the work is the material cause; the as yet to be realized finished product inheres in the substance as the formal cause, and is released by the workmanship of the artist, as the efficient cause). The art’s purpose is the final cause. It seems to me that techne, as used by Heidegger includes all of those types of causality.
But Heidegger emphasizes the dialogue between the artist and their work --- they both meet, in immediacy, in the work of art itself. This approach emphasizes practice or praxis.( For Plato, on the other hand, the Forms exist, disembodied, in the World of Forms and matter is itself is but a pale imitation of the supersensible Form.)
We’ve described how art, for Heidegger, involves the establishment of immediacy, or what is revealed and shared, between the artist and their creation, or the viewer and art object. The special sense of intimacy may fade in time, or in the context of ordinary activity. Buber’s famous I-Thou and I-It basic words, or basic attitudes toward experience seem to illustrate Heidegger’s concept in a very graphic way.
In his book, I and Thou Martin Buber<3> describes how we establish immediacy and a sense of oneness with the other through dialogue. Dialogue is key concept for Buber in that it represents real meeting with the other. Buber is critical of Heidegger, his contemporary, and in a later essay regards Heidegger’s concept of truth as unconcealedness as a form of monologue, and not as dialogue. However, to this writer, Heidegger’s description of techne and artistic creation does seem to be very dialogical, as is Heidegger’s analysis of George Trakl’s poem, and other concepts too.
Heidegger’s Analysis of George Trakl’s poem, A Winter Evening
As we wrote earlier in this essay, the artist’s confrontation with the otherness of the other results in language, and the Clearing and the Open which is expressed in art. In an essay, in Poetry, Language Thought, called Language, Heidegger describes art on a parallel track as the above, but in different terms, , as a coming together of what he calls heaven and gods and humans and earth and humans. He tries to use language to express immediacy, as he did in Being and Time. So, here, he uses language to express a kind of primal vitality, in using the participle in place of the noun. Thus, he writes of one’s experience of the sky and of the earth as skying of the sky and the worlding of the world . One doesn’t passively perceive the sky but the act of perception become participatory, a celebration or communion with the object. Hence, skying the sky, or worlding the world. These two sentences express the two realms of being which is the source of language and art. He develops this in his analysis of Trakl’s poem. It is a short poem, and we present it here in full.
A Winter Evening By George Trakl
Window with falling snow is arrayed, Long tolls the vesper bell, The house is provided well, The table is for many laid.
Wandering ones, more than a few, Come to the door on darksome courses. Golden blooms the tree of graces Drawing up the earth’s cool dew.
Wanderer quietly steps within; Pain has turned the threshold to stone. There lie, in limpid brightness shown, Upon the table bread and wine.
Heidegger attempts to explain human experience in terms of the interaction or communion between the energies above and below –the sky and the earth, or mortals and divinities. Heidegger describes this meeting of these two realms of existence in fascinating, and I think, unique language.
The world grants to things their presence. Things bear world. World grants things.” p 202 Heidegger calls the distinction between the realms of existence, Difference, p. 202 also the Rift.
Relating directly to the poem, Heidegger writes:
The first stanza of the poem bids the things to come which, thinging, bear world. The second stanza bids that world to come which, worlding, grants things. The third stanza bids the middle for world and things to come <sic>: the carrying out of the intimacy…p 203…
And he continues, a few pages later:
The third stanza calls world and things into the middle of their intimacy. The seam that binds their being toward one another is pain—the pain that has turned the threshold to stone, as expressed in the poem. p. 205
For a number of quotations from the essay The Origin of the Work of Art on the subject on language and poetry, please see Appendix 2.
Once again, let us note that Heidegger’s very use of the participle, the thinging of things and wording of words expresses participation of subject and object in those shared experiences. This would be an additional example, refuting Martin Buber’s claim that Heidegger’s writings, as those on concealing and unconcealment in art, express monologue with oneself, rather than dialogue with the other.
In concepts such as things bear the world, and the world grants things, and his use of the participle, as skying the sky, and the worlding of the world, Heidegger is trying to see beyond the Rift between the realms of the earthly and that of divinities, as expressed through art. Personally, it seem to this writer that he’s offering a poetic statement on the old philosophical question, Why there is something rather than nothing. Because the possibilities for dialogical meeting of different energies from above and below exist.
Hegel and Heidegger
…Heidegger’s differences with Hegel on the relationship between art and knowledge is instructive for us. Both thinkers maintain that art develops in history. <4> The main point of comparison is that Heidegger views poetry as the ground of art and as the basic mode of expression between Being, as the totality of what is, and individual beings. Truth is expressed in sensuous form, in language, and poetry. Art expresses truth – art lets truth originate, in its historical sense, as he write near the end of the essay, The Origin of the Work of Art P. 77). Poetry expresses the most fundamental truths of existence in language as the most expressive and pliable of mediums. It is not expressed through the reason, or in a rational fashion. Please see Appendix 2 for quotations from Poetry, Language Thought on the relationship between art and poetry.
Hegel writes in his famous book Phenomenology of Mind (or Spirit <Geist>) that Absolute Knowledge is the highest level of self-awareness or self-consciousness of God, or Absolute Spirit. Absolute Spirit becomes conscious of itself by entering the world and interacting with it through history as Objective Spirit, (as the legal structure of a society) and art and culture (what Hegel calls the Subjective Spirit). This is not unlike Aristotle’s concept of the Prime Mover, as thought thinking thought, but as expressed in history and art. For Hegel, art is a step down, a step below Absolute Knowledge, for it expresses truth in a sensuous form (whether the art be poetry, painting, or music). For Hegel, only Reason, reflecting on itself and its journey (or phenomenology) through history discovers truth.<4> .< Please see the final citation from Appendix 2 for more on Heidegger and history>
In his early classic, Being and Time, Heidegger writes that language is the house of being. In his later work on art, language is expressed more fundamentally in poetry, which is the ground of all the arts. Language itself is the most plastic of all mediums and so it is the basis of all the other modes of expression. Poetry is not Absolute Knowledge – the connection between Being and beings does not occur only on the level of reason but sensuously. Similarly, Heidegger eschews Plato’s dualism between appearance and reality, and Plato’s dismissive view of art as mere imitation of an imitation (objects).
To summarize this, Heidegger elevates the sensuous character of art to the most basic yet, elevated level of human awareness, unlike Hegel, for whom reason occupies that place. And of all the arts, Heidegger sees poetry as the highest because it uses language directly, which makes it more pliable and expressive than any other artistic medium.<see Appendices 1 and 2 for extended passages on this.>
Martin Heidegger Meets Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps
Earlier we spoke of how people themselves are increasingly liable to be sliced and diced with biological, mechanical, robotic and genetically altered components, and so, subject to being assembled and dissembled in various ways.
Enter the current world economic crisis caused by mortgage debt which was securitized and sliced and diced into all various financial instruments, many of which were regarded as safe, or passed muster by different regulators. Short-term profit was the name of the game. The real estate bubble burst, much like the .com bubble almost 10 years earlier, and the Savings and Loan scandals 10 years or so before that. Bank runs and failures, in this country, go back to the 19th century. As the housing bubble burst, people defaulted on their mortgages for various reasons. Because these financial instruments were spread throughout the world, the debt spread like a virus. No one could find the rotten ingredient because it was spread around, or separate it from the good ingredients, and assign a value to the resulting product.
Do we not see parallels between the fragmenting of human beings through science and technology, the fragmenting of the physical planet, and the fragmenting of the financial body of the planet? Yet, this is taking place in the age of globalization and supposed unity of peoples. Why? Because greed and the search for short term profit cause fragmentation in all of these spheres of planetary life. Do you see the relevance of Heidegger here? The techne of agriculture and the relationship of human beings to the planet ought to be one of sustainability, nor of short term use and destruction. As globally based finance has brought the world to its knees through short term profit and greed, what is the techne here? Perhaps there will be renaissance of small scale communities, ecologically based, and of cities themselves, on a smaller scale, of micro-lending banking with its almost 0% default rate in the third world, now coming to the US with American branches.
And what do healthy, happy people like to do? They often create art, which they often like to share with others, which sometimes express their thoughts about the human condition. There is dialogue and sharing. Hopefully, thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber will help us get to such a place, and remind us how to stay there, as individuals and as a species. Notes and Appendices follow.
<2> cited in article, 21% of Americans Scramble to Pay Drug, Health Bills, USA Today online, 3-10-09 http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2009-03-10-gallup-medical-bills_N.htm
<3> A bit more on Buber, here. He considers the I-Thou and the I-It basic words or basic attitudes as expressing a twofold approach to experience. We could address the other as a Thou, as a subject, and meet the other in the between, with a sense of unity and immediacy. Or, we could address the other as an It and regard it as merely an object to be used and manipulated. Buber writes that the Thou necessarily fades, that the sense of meeting the other through immediacy ceases, and we relate the other once again, as an It. The I-It and I-Thou basic words are, basically, re-worked as the concepts of distance and relation in Buber’s later work, The Knowledge of Man
<4>For Hegel history is dialectical or developmental, generating new forms, while for Heidegger, history is not necessarily dialectical in Hegel’s sense nor merely circular (as in Nietzsche’s concept of eternal recurrence) This question is well outside the scope of this paper, though quotes from Appendices 1 and 2 touch on it. Heidegger distinguishes historicism from subjectivism, and asserts that historically speaking, progression as the end, is inherent in the beginning. <The Origin of the Work of Art, pp.76, 77.>
Appendix 1 – some quotations from The Origin of the Work of Art on language and poetry
…..All art, as the letting happen of the advent of the truth of what is, is, as such essentially poetry.” (p.72) …… What poetry, as illuminating projection, unfolds of unconcealedness and projects ahead into the design of the figure, is the Open which poetry lets happen, and indeed in such a way that only now, in the midst of beings, the Open brings beings to shine and ring out. p.72 … language alone brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. When there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of that which is not and of the empty. p.73
Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to word and to appearance. Only this naming nominates beings to their being from out of their being. Such saying is a projecting of the clearing, in which announcement is made of what it is that beings come into the Open as. Projecting is the release of a throw by which unconcealedness submits and infuses itself into what is as such. This projective announcement forthwith becomes a renunciation of all the dim confusion in which what is veils and withdraws itself. pp.73-74
Projective saying is poetry: the saying of world and earth, the saying of the arena of their conflict and thus of the place of all nearness and remoteness of the gods. Poetry is the saying of the unconcealedness of what is. Actual language at any given moment is the happening of this saying, in which a people’s world historically arises for it and the earth is preserved as that which remains closed. Projective saying is saying which, in preparing the sayable, simultaneously brings the unsayable as such into a world. In such saying, the concepts of an historical people’s nature, i.e. of its belonging to world history, are formed for that folk, before it. p.74
Appendix 2- Heidegger –from the Origin of the Work of Art, pp 74-76, quotations are verbatim, in the original order, as written, on art, poetry and language
Poetry is thought of here in so broad a sense and at the same time in such intimate unity of being with language and word, that we must leave open whether art, in all its modes from architecture to poesy, exhausts the nature of poetry. p.74
Language itself is poetry in the essential sense. But since language is the happening in which for man beings first disclose themselves to him each time as beings, poesy – or poetry in the narrower sense – is the most original form of poetry in the essential sense. Language is not poetry because it is the primal poesy; rather poesy takes place in language because language preserves the original nature of poetry. Building and plastic creation, on the other hand, always happen already, and happen only, in the Open of saying and naming. It is the Open that pervades and guides them. But for this very reason they remain their own ways and modes in which truth orders itself into work. They are an ever special poetizing within the clearing of what is, which has already happened unnoticed in language. p.74
Art, as the setting-into-work of truth, is poetry. Not only the creation of the work is poetic, but equally poetic, though in its own way, is the preserving of the work; for a work is in actual effect as a work only when we remove ourselves from our commonplace routine and move into what is disclosed by the work, so as to bring our own nature itself to take a stand in the truth of what is. pp.74-75
The nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth. We understand founding here in a triple sense; founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning. Founding, however, is actual only in preserving. Thus, to each mode of founding there corresponds a mode of preserving….Founding is an overflow, an endowing, a bestowal. p.75
<Heidegger restates here the historical thrust of the work of art. Continuing from above, Heidegger continues:>
The poetic projection of truth that sets itself into work as figure is also never carried out in the direction of an indeterminate void. Rather, in the work, truth is thrown toward the coming preservers, that is, toward an historical group of men. What is thus cast forth is, however, never an arbitrary demand. Genuinely poetic projection is the opening up or disclosure of that into which human being, a historical, is already cast. This is the earth and, for an historical people, it's earth, the self-closing ground on which it rests together with everything that it already is, though still hidden from itself. It is, however, its world, which prevails in virtue of the relation of human being to the unconcealedness of Being. For this reason, everything with which man is endowed must, in the projection, be drawn up from the closed ground and expressly set upon this ground. In this way the ground is first grounded as the bearing ground. pp. 75-76
Appendix 3: Some Additional Scientific Themes for Poetry of the 21st Century
1. If poets wish for something of an epic nature from contemporary science -- which may also involve pride, profit, and the opening of a certain very attractive box that starts with the letter P -- they would be advised to look in Cern, Switzerland.
At Cern, the Hadron Super Collider will attempt to speed elementary particles to near the speed of light, and so duplicate the moment of the origin of the universe, the Big Bang. This has been dubbed the search for the God- particle. The operation of the Collider at such speeds, will also apparently generate a very small black hole. Some physicists are concerned that the rate of entropy by the black hole, would be offset by its absorption of matter, and so it would expand with the remote possibility of swallowing the planet. Now we’ve found another subject for a poem from contemporary physics and its technology. (I can’t say that I’ve tackled this one yet, except for what I’ve done at www.technopoems.com)
If you wish something as dramatic but in the somewhat larger world of sub-atomic nano-particles, you’ll find that particular substances could be created with unique properties, but without the checks and balances found in the natural world. The general characteristics of nano-paricles is not totally understood, even though they are to be used in food additives, as I understand. An unchecked nano-substance with no natural or known controls, might, like the human-engineered black hole generated by the God particle at Cern, endlessly replicate itself, turning the world to what has been called “grey goo.” This would be like the broom that keeps multiplying, carrying more and more water, in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” (This would be a scientific analogue to Collateralized Debt Obligations!) Interestingly enough, the logo of the Hadron Supercollider at Cern is Shiva, the Hindu god of the dance of life, and of destruction. The traditional statue of Shiva was presented to the laboratory by the Indian government to signify the subatomic dance of the elementary particles, and creation and destruction of the universes. Not destruction this time, we hope?!
2. NASA recently launching Kepler, an interstellar telescope which searches for habitable planets in a certain portion of the sky. If extra-terrestrial beings are eventually contacted, what might the human being -hybrids of the future share with them. Philosophies of art? Works of art? Or would the descendents of the present day humans have time or inclination for such speculation, especially if they repeat the actions of their physical ancestors who plundered their native planet, murdered or enslaved local inhabitants, often in the name of their God, their higher power. Would such a being be any closer to answering the question of why there is something rather than nothing, or why we here at all? If there is a creator of the universe, might they not be an artist, or alternatively, how could they not be an artist.
Appendix 4 – Some Themes for Poetry: Being and Non-Being in Western Philosophy – A Heuristic Approach to Poetry
1. Art as Expansive, Art as Contractive
Art doesn’t depict only fullness, nature’s bounty and positive human emotions, as love, but art also depicts the negative, the ugly, the unsustainable, the ugly, the grotesque, and the exploitative. Art can move us, in the twinkling of an eye from an experience of fullness to that of emptiness, from hope to despair, from being to nothingness.
Art that is expansive and art that is contractive, could respectively correspond to philosophies of Being and Non Being.
Art that deals with expansive issues would give us, a view of life as a plenum, a fullness. This is the joie de vie as expressed in art. However, life also has contracted aspects, of various kinds of privation and suffering, and eventually old age and death. This is also expressed in terms of alienation, and the language of the dualism between subject and object of experience. .
Classicism and Romanticism in the West, have historically provided the basic styles or attitudes of representation in art, including poetry. Artists have used art of both of these styles to express themes that are expansive or contractive, as described above.
2. Some Thoughts on Art and Being in Western Philosophy
In philosophy, the question of existence has been described in terms of the relationship between Being and non- being, from the time of pre-Socratic thinkers through the present.
The Classical Greek philosophers, writing at the beginning of Western thought, describe existence in terms of permanence and change, and in terms of expansion and contraction.
Parmenides, writing before Socrates, maintains that change is illusory because if there is something, and it starts to change, then it negates itself. Something could not be, and not be, at the same time, so he concludes that change is illusory. Being, for Parmenides, is not an abstraction, but a fullness, a plenum, which is conceived as a sphere. Heidegger in Poetry, Language, Thought, associates his views on art with Parmenides, insofar as art originates in a primal encounter with the other, in the experience of the Clearing or Fullness from which language and art proceeds.
Plato later takes this concept, moving it literally into the very sky of his thinking. As in Greek mythology, he places the realm of unchanging Being into his World of Forms, which provides a model for physical things. Plato sees the red chair as an inherently imperfect copy of the Forms of redness and chairness, both of which have independent existence in the World of Forms, which is also a kind of cosmic Receptacle. Plato was supposedly also a member of the Mystery schools of ancient Greece, derived from the Egyptian Mystery Schools, which involve Gnosis or direct, intuitive apprehension of higher wisdom.
The world of Forms or unchanging Being, or the supersensible world, is real while the physical world, in its changeability, is unreal, a shadow world, as Plato describes in his very famous Parable of the Cave. In contrast to Being, the world of matter is the world of change. A non-personal divine Being, the Demiurge fashions the world of matter and Forms.
The search for Being is primary for Heidegger, both in his early and later work. He identifies with Parmenides’ work insofar as it represents the search for Being, as we’ve mentioned. At the same time he sees the loss of Being in Western philosophy as originating with Plato, because Plato sees the physical world as unreal and as a world of mere appearances and shadows, estranged from the world of Reality, the realm of Being.
Aristotle, Plato’s student, who was also a scientist, tries to combine the world of form and matter in this world. Each thing is a combination of a general and particular principle, for instance, a red chair combines the matter of the chair with the form of chairness, and the form of redness, which inheres in the chair itself. (Later thinkers–so-called nominalists, like William of Occam in the late Middle Ages, place the form of redness in the human mind.) Created beings form a hierarchy which has been described as the Great Chain of Being, by Arthur Lovejoy, a historian of ideas. Unlike Darwin’s theory of evolution, species are fixed, and do not evolve from each other, though they are interconnected through genus and species. Each genus becomes the species for a more evolved genus, moving from earlier simple organisms upwards to more complex ones.
Later Neo-Platonist thinkers, in the early Christian era, combine these aspects of Plato and Aristotle. The realm of Being or Permanence seeks to manifest itself in the physical world, while created and therefore finite beings long to reunify with their source. Neo-Platonism became associated with the search for Gnosis, or direct mystical insight into Reality, and the One – that is above all predication, from which all beings ultimately proceed.
Later Western thought tends to separate the philosophical idealism of Plato from the materialism or naturalism of Aristotle. Both streams of Greek thought strongly influence Christianity, with Plato influencing Augustine and Luther, and Aristotle influencing Thomas Aquinas, who remains the basic influence today, in the Catholic Church.
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Art as Subjectivity alone, without universality, expresses alienation of the part from the whole, art as non-being, of subjectivity. One thinks of Sartre‘s concepts of authenticity vs. bad faith. Subjectivity is often associated with Descartes, the famous 17th century French rationalist, scientist and mathematician. In his famous search for truth, Descartes formulates his famous Cogito, I think, therefore I am. Descartes is often contrasted with Pascal, his contemporary, also a scientist and mathematician. But Pascal’s famous words are "The heart has reasons which reason doesn’t understand." Heidegger mentions these two figures in Poetry, Language, Thought and associates his thinking with Pascal, rather than Descartes.
Notes on the Author: Paul Dolinsky holds a Ph.D in Philosophy, which he taught for several years at various colleges. He currently teaches online and offers private tutorials in Philosophy. He’s also done counseling, and has supported himself with odd jobs. He currently edits thegoldenlantern.com, a poetry submission site. He’s written a collection of poems on Western philosophy, a larger collection of poems based on Buddhist thought, and most recently, a philosophy study guide based on a popular contemporary novel, Red Mountain by Charles Entrekin. He writes poems, essays, far too many book reviews, and also works as a free lance writer, and editor. His email is pdolan@fairpoint.net and his websites include technopoems.com, historyofphilosophy.org and buddhistpoems.com.