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The Origin
of the Work of Art 22
February 2007 13:48
149 Origin means that through
which
something is what it is. This has an Aristotelian
meaning. The notion of cause. From which or by
something is what it is - by what it is we mean the essence of
something. Thus
when we ask about the origin of the work of art we are asking about is
'essential source'. Usually when we think about the origin or source of
a work
of art (WA) we think of the author
or the artist
-
we can link this to the idea of the dependent beauty in Kant - the
intentions
of the author or artist - we ask the question why was this WA of made
and we
think of the reasons that the artist might have had, or the social
conditions
of that production - what world the artist came from. But when we think
about
it a bit more we might ask what comes first the WA or the artist, since
without
the WA would the artist be an artist at all, or with the book, would
the author
be an author. Again this is a bit like Kant's idea of final causality
in CJ,
since it is the end that defines the beginning or the effect the cause.
The artist is
the origin of
the work. The work is the origin of the artist. This is really
a reworking of
efficient and final causality in Aristotle. But there is third thing
that without
this reciprocal relation would not exist at all, and that is what we
call art. Think of the
description of
seeing in The Republic - without the visible there would not be
sight
and the seen, but the visible is not the same kind of being as the
other two -
it is neither in sight nor in the seen, rather it is presence of the
light
which makes their relation possible. Aren't we moving in a
circle here - what
art is to found in the WA, but the WA is only art because of art
itself. If we
are going to define art from specific examples, then what lets us say
this
example is art and this one isn't unless we already know what art is.
Even if
we going to pick out characteristics, then how do we know which ones to
pick
out in advance? 150 But why should we be scared
of the
circle. It is logic that says that circles of reasoning make an
argument
invalid, but in this case the circular relation between the definition
of art
and the WA might be the only way that we can go. So the only way to
find out
what art is, is to actually examine a work of art and see what we see
there. WA
are all around us, pictures, buildings, music scores and books. If we
don't
first of all presuppose what art is, we can say that what these things
are is
precisely that, things and even the refined aesthetic experience cannot
deny
that - picture are made from canvas, paint and wood; buildings from
stone and
wood; books from paper and ink, and so too music scores. Is this a sly
reference to
Kant's theory that our aesthetic experience is completely indifferent
to the
existence of the object. But without the thing like quality of WA,
there would
be nothing to experience at all. Kant would
say that it is a matter of
attitude
towards the object; that is, I bracket its real existence and only
relate to
its representation. In a certain sense, we might want to say that
Heidegger
wants to return to the truth of the object. 151 But what do we mean by
'thing' when we
speak about the WA and what is a thing after all? When we ask about the
thing, what we are
asking about is its being. What does it mean to be a thing. We are
asking about
how a thing is. There is difference between asking how
a thing
is, from what a thing is. When I ask about what, I am thinking about a
list of
properties. When I ask how, I am thinking does a thing exist different,
with
all its properties, from other kinds of beings - we might conclude that
there
are not other kinds of being, such that every being is a thing, but we
would
still have to ask how things are. So what do we mean by a
thing. H. give a
list of examples - jug, stone, clod of earth, and so on (and even
things that
don't exist or are not perceived directly are things - like the world
as a
whole, or God). We like Socrates might ask that we don't want a list of
examples, but a definition, which makes this list of examples a list of
the
same thing or type of being. 152 The first definition we get
is a thing
is everything that is not nothing.
So in this sense we might call the WA a thing. But isn't our definition
of
thing so broad that we end up with everything being a thing, and aren't
we
hesitant to call God a thing for example and still less do we think
that human
beings are just things: 'A man is not a thing'. We are more likely to call
object things
such as hammers and shoes, and even these are not mere things such as
natural
objects. Interesting
parallel here
between this distinction between man-made things and natural things,
and Kant's
dependent and free beauty. What is decisive to both is the idea that
human
beings are not the same as other beings in the world. Thus we go from the
definition of thing
as being - thus everything, to a restricted notion of thing as mere
thing,
which means natural things, where 'mere' has a pejorative meaning. 153 What then do we mean by
'thing' is this
restrictive sense? H argues that there are 3 meanings of thing in
Western
philosophy.
Doesn't Kant
still think of
the WA in a propositional way, even though the representation is now
referred
only to the subject and not the object? 154 But H wants to the relation
between
experience and language around. Is it language that is accurately
reflecting
experience, or is experience a projection of language? In other words
does
propositional language make us see reality in a certain way, that we
wouldn't
see without it? But could we transpose propositional thought into the
thing if
the thing wasn't there in the first place? 155 Rather than saying one is
the reflection
of the other - we have to see that they have a common source and thus
we would
have to see that this idea of thing bearing properties, or attributes
is not as
fundamental as we first might think. It has only become fundamental
because it
has become familiar through repetition, and its common source, has been
forgotten which once people thought strange and alien and made them
think. One clue that the concept
of thing is
not as fundamental as we might think for understanding the being of
things, is
that as a language and experience it covers everything, and not just
what we
might think of as things. We seemed to have ended up were we started
with a general
definition of thing that covers every being and therefore does not
really tell
us what a thing is or isn't. We feel that the thought
concept of
thing has done violence to the thing and does not really respond to
what the
things, is the real quality and experience of things. This makes us
want to
give up thinking altogether, but what if the feeling were actually, in
this
case, more intelligent than the thought concept, more 'intelligently
perceptive' as H puts it. How can we be more
responsive to the
being of the thing without doing violence to it.
156 First of all we have to let
the thing
appear to us as thing without us presupposing what a thing is This is a
classic
phenomenological move for H as describe in Being and Time. Our
method
should be led by how things show themselves as themselves and not how
we think
they should, or mediate by some philosophical or scientific model or
paradigm. The first way we encounter
things is not
through the thought concept of philosophy, but through our bodies -
that is to
say, sensations. But even this is immediately thought
- i.e. sensations are interpreted as unity of
manifold - thus I experience hardness, colour, noise, and also these
sensations
are then unified in the experience of an object (here H is obviously
referring
to Kant). But is true to say that I experience sensations first of all,
and
then I construct them into an object? In what sense
is H for or
against sensations? I would want to say that is some sense he wants to
redeem
sensations, but not in the form of the intellectualist tradition
represented by
Kant, where sensations are meaningless without the addition of concepts. I don't, H says experience
a throng of
sensations and then a object, rather I immediately hear the car outside
of my
window - my sensations are already meaningful from a phenomenological
viewpoint. 'Much closer to us than all sensations are the things
themselves.'
To hear sensations we actually have to stop relating to things - that
is we
have to abstract ourselves from them in our experience, such as in
philosophical examples or in the laboratory. In seems that in sensation
we are trying
to get as close to the thing as we possibly can, but actually it
doesn't get us
close to them at all - in fact it virtually removes us from them
altogether,
because sensations are abstractions of thought - we do not experience
them at
all 157 Is there a third
interpretation of thing
we is more loyal to our experience of it, which doesn't push it off
like the
thought concept, or have it too close like sensations? The third idea of the thing
is formed
matter. This notion is applicable equally to natural things and
utensils.
Doesn't this distinction allow us for the first time to really answer
why the
WA is also a thing? The thing quality of the work of art is its matter.
What it
is made of and which the artist forms in order to produce the WA. However, just because this
distinction
is so well used within aesthetics does not mean by rights that it is
the
correct one. Moreover this distinction is now used for everything. It
has, H
argues, become 'hackneyed'. If form is linked to the rational and the
logical,
and matter to the irrational and illogical, then this distinction is
tied into
subject and
predicate, and we again
return to a
propositional language which takes over everything. We have to ask ourselves
where this
distinction has its origin in the mere thing or the WA? What does it
mean to
think of the thing in terms of matter and form? We might say that form
is the
'arrangement of matter' and its selection - we would not make a jug out
of a
matter that was porous. This relation between for and matter, their
'interfusion' H calls it, is determined in advance by their use. This
use is
neither assigned in advance or floats above it as an end (in other
words
Heidegger wants to avoid using a Aristotelian language here). Usefulness is the way in
which this
being appears to us - it is something that is added on on top of the
mere thing
and the interfusion of the matter and form is itself something that is
given
through this usefulness. Something useful is
something produced
and it is something produced for a purpose. Matter and form are
therefore
related to equipment, and equipment is to be understood in terms of
use. For
this reason, they cannot be the original source for the meaning of
things 159 Matter and form, however,
is the is the
most immediate understanding of beings because it what is most closely
related
to human beings. For things are understood as formed matter through the
production of human beings - it is human
beings that form matter, that give to its shape and purpose and because
equipment is intermediate between WA and thing, it can be the means by
which
all things can be understood. This is supported by
religious belief
which tends to see God as a master craftsman and therefore the whole
world as
something that is made. Of course, this does mean that faith has to be
thought
in terms of this relation, but there is not doubt that the Aristotelian
distinction, once it is linked to Christian faith through the work of
Aquinas,
receives an even great boost and dominance over our way of thinking
about
things. Thus even when faith has been lost, nonetheless the productive
way of
understanding beings generally through the matter form distinction
still
retains its power. 160 Thus modern metaphysics
still retains
the matter form distinction even though the idea of creation in the
religious
sense has lost its meaning. How then do we get to the
real being of
things beyond these 3 determinations? One way is to go back to the idea
of the
'mere' thing - which would be stripped both of its use and
equipmentality. But
just stripping the thing of its use does would not allow is to get back
to the
thing. All we would be left with is a blank All three determinations,
therefore, do
violence to thing. Over the years
they have interfused so now
its is
virtually impossible to encounter the thing as a thing, equipment as
equipment
and still less the WA as the WA. 161 But knowing about these
conceptual
determinations which do violence against the being of the thing is
already an
way into the true meaning of that being, since all we have to do at
first is
not let these conceptual models get in the way of our experience of the
thing a
thing - to let the thing be as a thing. But this might be the hardest
to think,
especially when we should think of this 'letting be' as merely
indifference. We seem to meet a
resistance from the
thing, as soon as we accept that the traditional ways of thinking about
the
thing do violence to is. Maybe this resistance, however, is the very
way in
which the thing is as a thing. We interpret things through
equipment
and this is because this in the kind of things that our closest to us.
This is
also why the form matter distinction has such a hold over us, because
it
relates to things as they are made. But does the form matter
distinction really
disclose what the being of equipment really is? 162 H takes the example of one
particular
kind of equipment (and this example is not without a certain
predetermination
as we shall see). It is some peasant shoes. How are we to visualise
these
shoes. H says that we might take the example of Van Gogh's picture of
some
peasant shoes This seems a
pretty strange
example - it seems, in the text, that H just picks this example from
thin air,
but is it as arbitrary as it seems. Why pick a painting and not a
photograph
for example, or a technical drawing. Why Van Gogh and not just any old
picture.
The nonchalance of this example seems rather forced, and this is even
before we
find out that the picture that H is talking about is not even a picture
peasant
shoes. But H says do this picture
of the shoes
really tells us anything about them. Isn't it just representation of
shoes
which can be used in different ways. Thus all we discover is
that the
equipmental value of things is their use, and we already knew this. But
surely
if we really want to know what equipment is, rather than looking at
them in a
picture we have to see them in their use. The shoes really are
equipment when
the peasant women walks across the field and then to her they are not
really
visible at all. They disappear, so to speak, in their use. 163 If we just look at the
picture as a
representation of shoes then the equipmentality will remain completely
invisible to us.
163 But is the picture just a
representation
does it not reveal the earth and the world of the peasant women and is
this is
not something much more than just the representation of a piece of
equipment in
the abstraction? This the first
time world and
earth are mentioned in H's essay but he doesn't really say anything
about them
at this point - all we know here is that this revealing is not just a
representation of something - we can begin to see why now H picked this
example, and not just a picture or drawing of peasant shoes - he wants
to say
that is the power of this painting that reveals something and that is
why it
arrests our attention. 164 For the peasant woman the
shoes reveal
themselves in their reliability. This is how the world and earth are
revealed
to her. But has this description told us anything about the being of
equipment
or even more so the being of the WA which is what we are really seeking? What we have learnt is that
the being of
equipment is reveals not through a conceptual description, nor even
through
their use in which they disappear, but through Van Gogh's painting.
What it
does is reveal the truth of the shoes. But what do we mean by truth in
this
context? We don't mean propositional truth do we? Rather we mean truth
as
disclosure, what the Greeks called alētheia. This truth is not a
statement about something,
which might be true or false, but is an event. Truth is not said about
something, rather it happens. There is truth happening in the WA. In
the WA,
the peasant shoes are 'set to work' - that is they stand forth in their
truth -
they reveal themselves as what they are. 165 We are seeking the thingly
character of
the work of art. We have discovered that the ways that we think about
things
actually does violence to them rather than reveal them as they are. The
predominate way of thinking about things, formed matter, does not even
come
from the being of things themselves but from equipment. This means that
we have
ask ourselves what equipment itself is. What we discovered is that is
the WA
which reveals the truth of equipment, where truth is an event of a
disclosure
or revealing. Thus we suddenly saw what is at work in the WA: the
disclosure of
the way of being of beings. Thus we realise that to attempt to
understand the
work of art as thing is in fact a mistake. In taking the WA of a thing,
we end
up interpreting it as a piece of equipment that has an aesthetic value
added on
top of it. 166 The WA is no more a piece
of equipment
than a mere thing is. It's way of being is something quite different.
What we
have realised is that if we are going to understand what a thing is,
what a
piece of equipment is and what a WA is, then we have to do so through
their
different ways of being. It is not that we deny the thingly quality of
the WA,
but it must be understand from within its way of being, and not through
'pseudo-
concepts' that come from
the history of
philosophy, or through the other ways of being of equipment and mere
things. Art reveals being of beings
in its own
way. This means that truth happens in the work of art. The next
question we
have to ask ourselves, therefore, is what is the happening of truth? The Work and Truth 167 The work of art needs to
stand on its
own, be autonomous - but even the artist stands in this relationship to
the work
of art. Thus in relation to the art work, the artist himself is nothing
- he is
banished from it. 'The artist remains inconsequential as compared with
the
work.' What do we say about art
that is hanging
in museums, whose images we can see in magazines, or which we can hang
on our
rooms - are these works of art? Are they autonomous, or do they belong
to the
'art industry'. In all of this industry, with its curators, critics and
experts, is the work of art itself encountered as art. What happens is that these
works of art
are torn from their 'native sphere'. In being placed in a collection or
published again they no longer belong to their own world. This is even
the case
if we visit the place in which the art was originally created (like the
cathedral) - the world in which it had its place, no longer exists. We need art
that addresses
our world, not art of the past. This disappearance of a
world cannot be
undone. This is why it is always strange looking at art of the past -
they
exist only a relics of an age that we can no longer understand or
appreciate -
or even beyond that - the world that this art disclosed no longer
exists - it
only communicates to our world from the outside. 168 They have become something
that is
traditional and conservative - something that experts and critics can
argue
over and debate. They are not art, but simply objects. What is the difference
between a work
and an object. This is what is so difficult for us to see. First of all
the
work belongs to the world that it reveals or discloses in the way that
the
object is separated and distanced from it - the object has become inert
and
lifeless in some way - it does not speak to us anymore. In the work, as
H
described in the picture by Van Gogh, truth happens. Let us now think of the
happening of
truth outside of representational art. Let us think of it in terms of a
Greek
temple. The temple reveals the world of an 'historical people'.
169 The temple stands - its
stands against
the sky and the weather, it stands against the rock and the earth upon
which it
rests - it discloses the world in this standing against. In the great
sweep of
the river of time in which all civilisations will disappear it
announces the
meaning of a world for a people - it unifies and gives expression to
that
world. This emerging and giving form, the Greeks called physis.
This
illuminates that on which all human beings dwell, which is earth. Earth
here is
understood matter or the astronomical planet - it that from which the
gathering
disclosing power of art rises up from and also falls back into. It is
that
which 'shelters' the meaning of art. Thus there are two
tendencies of the
work of art. It is that which discloses the world, and at the same sets
this
disclosing against the earth. - World and earth are the two opposite
tendencies
of the work of art, its rhythm and pace. The earth is
what is dark in
the work of art - every work has something that is dark in it - it is
the
background from which the truth happens and falls back into - don't
experience
this darkness as a lack of meaning, but as the possibility. We have to reverse the
order between the
art work and reality It is this
reversal that is
so peculiar and strange in Heidegger's account - it is also what
influences
Blanchot. Thus the temple isn't a
representation
of reality that was already there - it is what gives to reality, if we
can use
this word, its meaning, sense and wholeness. Without the temple, there
would be
no world. 'The temple, in its standing there, first gives, to things
their look
and to men their outlook on themselves.' This opening, H adds,
continues as long
as the work works - when it becomes a object in a museum, then it
ceases to
have this power of revelation and unification of a world - it ceases to
be image
of a work - art expresses the unity of a world, this is what is a work
of art
does - it makes truth happen, it produces the truth. 170 The work therefore 'sets up
a world',
but we still haven't got any closer to what we mean by a world. The world is not a
collection of things
or object that are ready to hand or present to hand. Nor is it a
representation
that we add to these collections of things. Rather than a noun, the
world is a
verb 'the world worlds'. It is not something that we perceive, and it
cannot be
seen. The worlding of the world belongs to our being, to what is
authentic and
inauthentic about our being. Stones, plants and animals do not have
world, but we do - the
world of the
peasant woman that is revealed in Van Gogh's painting. Even the death
of God
belongs to a world. The work is what makes
space, or frees
up space, for a world. If we think of the work of
art as
setting up a world, how can we now make sense of its materiality? In
normal
tools the materiality of the thing disappears in its use. I do notice
the
matter of the hammer when I am hammering in the nail. On the contrary,
for the
work of art, the materiality of the object, comes to the fore in the
opening of
a world. The weight and size and massiveness of the temple which is
more that
just the perceptual properties of the stone. It thrusts up out of the
earth. The materiality of the
work, which the
work both sets forward and falls make into is the earth. Setting forth
here
means that the work of art bring the earth out into the open, it lets
it be. Our then does the earth
reveal itself.
It does not make itself present. Rather it shows itself by not
revealing
itself. 172 This is what H means when
he says that
the difference between the sculptor and the mason, is that the former
does not
use the stone up - in art something of the materiality of the art work
resists
being used up by us - and it is this resistance that is revealed. It is
not
being used up which allows the matter of art, the colour, tone, and
word, to
shine forth as colour, tone, and word, rather than being a means for
something
else in which it disappears in use - the work of art calls attention to
matter
but no so as to make matter a thought or idea (this would be
cognition), but to
allow it to show itself as matter. To be sure,
the poet also
uses the word - not, however, like ordinary speakers and writers who to
use
them up, but rather in such a way that the word only now becomes and
remains
truly a word. The autonomy of the work of
art lies in
this relation between world and earth in the work of art. The world is
the
history of a people, the earth what shelters this is vision and what
conceals
itself. They are different from one another, but always in relation to
one
another. But we should not think of this in a Hegelian sense as the
'empty
unity of opposites'. The world rests on the earth and wants to reveal
it,
whereas the earth always resists this disclosure and manifestation. This relation to earth and
world H calls
strife.
173 Strife should not be seen
in a negative
way as dispute and destruction. Rather it is in relation to one another
that
each assert what they are,
but in so doing, they each
carry one
another beyond themselves. Thus the earth cannot appear as earth
without the world,
and the world cannot set itself against something without the earth. The work of art is the
place or site in
which this strife between world and earth is 'instigated'. Not so as to
bring
world and earth into agreement, but so this strife can occur and be
intensified. Only know can we begin to
see what it
means to say that truth happens in the work of art. What do we mean by 'truth'.
Here we have
to go back to the original Greek experience of truth which is alētheia,
because it is not propositional truth that we are speaking about - it
is truth
as revealing and disclosing. Truth as unconcealment. 174 This isn't just about
taking refuge in
etymology and changing one idea of truth with another. It is through
this
etymology (the chapter in the Heidegger book on etymology) that we are
reminding ourselves of our everyday experience of truth but which
itself has be
concealed because of all the definitions of truth that we have learnt -
that
truth is about statements and propositions and not an experience, what
H calls
'correctness'. Representation does not
determine
unconcealedness but the other way round, its is unconcealedness that
determines
representation, because if our world was not revealed in some way, we
could not
say anything correct about it at all. Beings have to be there for us to
say
anything about them at all. 175 To understand how truth
happens, we
first of all have to understand what unconcealedness is. Things are -
this
means that they stand in Being. We need to distinguish between the
beings and
the 'light' in which beings stand - the open - such that they are there
for us.
This light is itself is not a being - but the opening through which
things are
visible and present to us - the presencing of what is present. Without this illumination
things would
not be present - this light grants things to us - allows us to have a
relation
to them - this presencing is what H mean by Being, and why Being is
different
from beings - the temptation is always to translate Being back into a
thing - God, matter and so on - Being is
not a
thing, it is not noun, but a verb - the presencing of the present -
presencing
as opposed to the present. Just as much, however, as
being can be
unconcealed in this region, also it can be concealed - truth as an
event,
rather than as representation or
mere correctness (2 + 2 =
4) is the
movement of both concealing and unconcealing. What is concealed isn't
outside
the sphere of presencing, but is within it - it belongs to the
intelligible. Can there be an
outside which
is even outside this play between the unconcealed and the concealed? Is
this
Blanchot's question? Thus everything that we
meet both
presents and conceals itself within this openness. H tells us that this
concealing must be
thought of in two ways:
176 Both forms of concealment
exist in the
presencing of the present - we should not see the unconcealment of
truth, the
light, as a stage in which everything is illuminated, as though it were
a
picture or photograph, rather darkness belongs to the light as much as
the
light does. Truth happens, but in this truth, there is both light and
shade. We thing that are at home
in the world -
everything is familiar and usable, but art reminds us that darkness
also
belongs to our experience of the world, that mystery is always a part
of our
experience - that thing resist us, are always more than what we say
about them.
'At bottom, the ordinary is not ordinary; it is extra-ordinary'. This
is what
the work of art has to remind us. This means that untruth belongs
originally to
truth. 177 As refusal, concealing is
the background
on which the open sets itself, as dissembling, it is the constant
possibility
of error. The event of truth, its essence, therefore is the strife
between
world and earth. We should not simply understand the world as the
light, and
the earth as the dark - rather we need to think them together as part
of what
is called a decision, and it belongs to the essence of any decision
that there
is always what it cannot master - this not being able to master, is not
the
opposite of a decision, for without it, there would be decision at all.
It is
only in conflict with one another that world and earth are at all. But how does truth happen
as this strife
between world and earth? One
way that it happens is
through the work
of art. Truth happens in the work of art. This does not mean that the
work of
art represents something. 178 Rather than correct
representation, we
need to think of art as revelation. Thus Van Gogh's picture is great
because it
reveals the world and the earth of the peasant shoes. And this
revelation is
what we mean by beauty. Though we now know how a
work of art
works - it is the happening of truth, we still don't know what the
thingly
nature of the work of art is, which is how we started this discussion.
In fact,
in speaking about the work of art as the happening of truth, it appears
that
this aspect, that the work of art is something produced and made, has
completely disappeared. 178 The happening of truth is
in the work.
Thus we have to go back to what the work is as thing - how the work is
produced
or effected. That we say that the work of art has been worked,
something
produced, means that it has come from an artist. 179 This means that the work of
art cannot
be understood simply in terms of itself, but must be thought of in
relation to
the artist. We have to ask ourselves,
therefore,
what is the difference between creation of the work of art and the mere
production of a thing? Isn't the procedure the same, whether we are
speaker of
a carpenter or a painter? Thus for Greeks they use the same word to
describe
them both techne. 180 But this comparison is
superficial,
because whatever the Greeks meant by techne they do not mean what we
mean by
production. What techne meant for the Greek was knowing in the broadest
sense
of the word, which is related to truth as presencing - aletheia. To
produce
something for the Greeks is to bring it forth, to make it present. To create therefore is make
truth happen
in a work - but does truth require a work in order to happen. Is there
a
strange attraction between truth and the work of art? We should not think of
truth simply as
intelligibility - un-truth belongs to truth. There is always a
concealing that
belongs to truth. For truth to happen require that the openness is
seized, and
for this openness to remain open, for the world to reveal itself, there
is
always has to be some being which does this work. There is no truth in
itself,
the truth emerges out of the darkness through a particular being, and
in this
case a particular work of art.
The express opening of
world therefore
always requires something in order for it to happen and this something
is
always a work of art. 182 It belongs essentially to
the work of
art that it is created, but this does not mean that we are talking
about great
artists. Rather what matters is that the
unconcealment of being happens in the great work of art. The work is,
and truth
happens in it. This is the difference
between the work
of art and equipment - the work of art calls attention to itself as
something
in which truth happens, whereas the piece of equipment disappears in
its use
and that it is is just a common place - the existence of the work of
art, on
the contrary, is something special and peculiar. That the work is, is the
solitariness of
the work of art - that stands out for itself and calls attention to
itself as
something singular. The more singular a piece of work is, the more it
breaks
with the ordinary and thus opens up the meaning of the world. 184 All art is poetry, if we
understand
poetry as the happening of truth which breaks with our involvement with
things.
Poetry here is meant in the widest sense as the happening of truth and
not just
poetry in the limited sense as verse. 185 This means thinking about
language in a
different way, not just as communication but as the opening of being
what H
calls 'projective saying', which brings what is both sayable and
unsayable into
the light. 186 Only in this saying do the
other arts
take place - in other words only because language reveals the world, do
the
other arts happen. Also the preserving of the
work of art
is poetry - only because we can separate ourselves from the everyday
world, can
we engage with works of art as revealing the truth of the world. 187 Art is an origin because it
is a
distinctive way in which truth is revealed and in this truth a
historical
people come to understand themselves. |