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Dr W Large Seeing
things 23
February 2007 13:49
It is important to set OW
in its
political context. Are we to see this essay as retreat from H's
political
misadventure with National Socialism and a rejection of science and
technology
for aesthetic romantic solipsism? The way that we view art in
our own
culture is one of representation. But don't we also argue about art
beyond the
simple question of realism. Don't we want art also to be edifying or
spiritual
which reflects the author's intentions and insight We take art be an
expression of
subjectivity - this is how H begins the OW. But even if we accept that
it is
about the author's intentions, this does not stop us argue about the
values
that are expressed in the WA, even those that might not be directly
visible to
the artist himself - thus the discussion always comes back to a
question of
value. Then we might be asking
about the
whether the film actually tells us something about our world. Thus we
can see
that the film does not just represent something. In this sense truth
happens in
the WA. Is H simply reversing the
order of
polarity between the subject and the object, such that it is the WA
that now
takes precedence over the artist? What is at issue for him is something
much
more fundamental than a simple reversal. It is a question of what it
means to
perceive or represent anything at all - what is at work in the WA. And
this
comes down to how we always see the world as some world or other - in
other
words there is always some kind of evaluation. If Heidegger want to reject
the artist
centred approach to art, why then does he choose Van Gogh who is
probably the
representative of the most extreme 'creator artist'? Perhaps because in
the
sense by taking what is thought of as the most subjective of art work,
he can
show that even in this case it is not really a question of the artist
intentions. H's object of critique is
twofold
However in making this move
from these
two common held positions, it seem that H first of turns toward the
object at
hand, i.e. the work of art. In one sense, this is to turn away from the
spiritualisation of art, and to remind the readers that after all they
are all
things even if we imagine that they are animated by a mysterious
aesthetic
value. What then is a thing? H
list 3 ways that
we thing about things in the West
Heidegger want to reject
all these ways
of thinking because they do violence to the experience of the thing -
the first
because the language of propositions does not seem to respond to our we
encounter things, the second because we never experience things in the
raw but
they are already meaningful for us and the third is related to the
usefulness
of things - what H call equipment - but he wants to say do the concepts
of matter
and form really make sense of our relation to equipment? The issue of art is,
therefore, is there
any other way of looking at the world that scientifically and
technologically.
Has the world been transformed into a resource that is just there to be
used
up? We have to remind ourselves
again that H
is a phenomenologist - the issue is not to come up with a better
concept of a
thing, but to allow the thing to shine forward as it in itself. What is important in H
analysis of the
picture is that he precisely does not see it as a representation - thus
it does
not matter whether it is a picture of the woman's peasant shoes or not.
Rather
he wants to argue that painting reveals the equipmentality of equipment
in a
way that the person who uses that equipment (whether it is Van Gogh or
the
peasant woman) cannot see. It is not an issue here of
choosing the
painting on the one side or the peasant shoes on the other - if we stay
with
the painting, then we are left with the two aesthetic positions that
Heidegger
rejects, and if we stay with the peasant's experience then the
equipmentality
of the equipment still remains invisible. What then does H give us -
a new
phenomenological description, and what we see is a new categorical
intuition or
schema which is earth and world. For what we
see here are in
fact the beginnings of a whole new schema of fundamental ontological
categories, the first of which are earth and world. What is revealed in the
work of art is
the world of the piece of equipment - it is not a thing that is
represented,
but a world that is disclosed. This revelation is not a
projection as
in the case of mathematics - in other words it does not predetermine
what the
things in the world are, rather it allows the world to appear, to shine
forth
as what it is. This does mean that the WA
creates the
world - that the world did not exist if there were not WA, rather it
discloses
or reveals this world in a way that for the participants in that world,
in
their daily activity, this world is not revealed at all.
But what is really
different from the
revealing power of art and science, it that in the disclosure of the
world
there is accepted what cannot be revealed, what remains hidden and
withdrawn
and this remains integral to our experience of the world. Thus the world struggles to
release
itself from the earth, but also it always falling back into the earth -
the
light and the dark - art is the sets the scene for such a strife. |