Heidegger, Paul Klee, and the origin of the work of art

Review of Metaphysics

Volumn 60, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 327-357

  Watson, Stephen H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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EID: 33846343686     PISSN: 00346632     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
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References (126)

1. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstader (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 27. Cited hereafter as PLT.
2. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 354. Cited hereafter as B.
3. Heinrich Weigand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues With Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 66.
4. See Franz Brentano, Grundzuge der Asthetik (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988).
5. See "Heidegger et la pensée du déclin," in Jean Beaufret, Dialogue avec Heidegger 3: Approche de Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974), 155-82.
6. Martin Heidegger, The, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill, Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 182. Cited hereafter as FCM.
7. See Jacques Taminiaux, "The Hegelian Legacy in Heidegger's Overcoming of Aesthetics," in Poetics, Speculation, and Judgement, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993).
8. See Otto Pöggeler, Bild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee und die Moderne Kunst (Munich: Wilhem Fink Verlag, 2002).
9. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 149, 146.
10. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Levitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 43-5. Cited hereafter as QCT.
11. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 142, 150.
12. Ibid., 59.
13. Letter to R. Kramer-Badoni, cited in R. Kramer-Badoni, Zwischen Allen Stuhlen (Munich: Herbig, 1985), 166.
14. Heidegger, FCM, 265.
15. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 148.
16. Ibid., 149.
17. Heidegger, PLT, 105.
18. Paul Klee, Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Mannheim (London: Lund Humpries, 1961), 66. Cited hereafter as N.
19. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, trans. Fred D. Wieck and J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 159. Cited hereafter as WCT.
20. Heidegger, PLT, 43.
21. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: MacMillan, 1973), 525 (A632/B660). Following the standard practice, I include the pagination of the first and second (or A and B) editions. While ontotheology "believes it can know the existence of (the original being) through mere concepts, without the help of any experience whatsoever" cosmotheology "proposes to deduce the existence of the original being from an experience in general."
22. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, revised by Forrest Williams (Humanities Press, 1981), 441. Cited hereafter as PoP.
23. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and John Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 170. Cited hereafter as BT.
24. Heidegger, PLT, 147.
25. See Edmund Husserl, "Marginal Notes on Being and Time," in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger 1927-1931, ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 285.
26. Heidegger, BT, 416.
27. Ibid., 492n.
28. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 221. Cited hereafter as AT. On Heidegger's discussion of giganticism, see B, 94.
29. See Kathryn E. Kramer, "Myth, Invisibility, and Politics in the Late Work of Paul Klee," in Languages of Visuality: Crossings Between Art, Politics, and Literature, ed. Beate Allert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996).
30. Heidegger too used classical myths deconstructively, as was the case with his reading of Hölderlin. Nonetheless Heidegger's earlier complicities with Nazism surely make his later criticisms much more ambiguous than Klee's. See Fred Dallmayr. The Other Heidegger (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993).
31. See Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (New York: Praeger: 1959), 186.
32. Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues, 150.
33. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 65.
34. Otto Pöggeler, "Heidegger on Art," in Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994), 122.
35. Heidegger, PLT, 34.
36. As Marcel Franciscono notes, Klee's point/line/space paradigm begins his "treatise" on art in the same way that Alberti and Leonardo had sought to emulate Euclid. His formalism however will break even with his Bauhaus colleagues in articulating the tension (Spanung) and (ontological) forces in their midst. See Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 248-55.
37. Klee, N, 5.
38. Ibid., 2.
39. F. Schlegel, Jugenschriften,
40. cited by Walter Benjamin, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," Selected Writings, vol. 1, trans. David Lachterman, Howard Eiland, and Ian Balfour (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 168.
41. Heidegger, QCT, 48.
42. Klee, N, 3.
43. On Gadamer and Benjamin's understanding of the symbolic in Klee, see my "Gadamer, Aesthetic Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Allegory: The Relevance of Paul Klee," Research in Phenomenology, 34 (2004): 45-72.
44. Conclusion to Faust, pt. 2, cited in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 198.
45. See David R. Burnett, "Paul Klee, From Symbolism to Symbol," in The Turn of the Century, German Literature and Art 1890-1915, ed. Gerald Chappel and Hans H. Schulte (Bonn: Bouvier, 1981), 237-48. As others have noted, the symbolists must be understood through their relation to romanticism. And, like Novalis, as others have equally attested, this means that Klee needs to be understood both in relation to the symbolist-romantic past and in relation to the modern constructivist account of formalism in linguistics and logic.
46. Petzet. Encounters and Dialogues, 149.
47. Klee, N, 3.
48. Ibid., 17.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., 24.
51. Martin Heidegger, Plato's Sophist, Irans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 81. Cited hereafter as S.
52. Klee, N, 76.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 69. See Werner Schmalenbach, "Paul Klee und Geometrie," in exhibition catalogue, Paul Klee (1879-1940) (Dusseldorf, 1993).
55. Klee, N, 60.
56. Ibid., 17. See Aristotle Poetics, where mythos involves the organization of events and poetics the art of composing plots (47a2) - or, as Ricoeur puts it, a propos transcendental imagination, it "extracts a configuration from a succession." See Time, and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 66.
57. Klee, N, 59.
58. Ibid., 9.
59. Heidegger, PLT, 99-100.
60. See Dirk Teuber, "Intuition und Genie: Aspekte des Transzendenten bei Paul Klee," Paul Klee. Konstruktion-Intuition (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1990), 39.
61. Martin Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 47.
62. Klee, N, 70.
63. Ibid., 5.
64. Ibid., 67.
65. Ibid., 5.
66. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 304.
67. Heidegger, BT, 492n.
68. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge Mass, MIT Press: 1985), 51.
69. Benjamin, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism," 183.
70. See for example, Pöggeler. "Heidegger on Art," 122.
71. Klee, N, 1.
72. Adorno, AT, 60.
73. See Martin Heidegger, "Cézanne," "Thoughts: For René Char," trans. Keith Hoeller, Philosophy Today 20, no. 4 (1976): 289: "In the later work of the painter, the duality of what is present and presence become one, "realized" (realiserf) and overcome at the same time, transformed into mysterious identity."
74. Klee, N, 78.
75. Adorno, AT, 124.
76. See Novalis, Schriften, Die Werke Friederich von Hardenbergs, ed. Paul Huckhohn and Richard Samuel, Fichtestudien, vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1971), 107. "How can ego and non-ego be posited in opposition to one another. Ego has heiroglyphic power."
77. See the analysis of this text in Geza von Molnar, Romantic Vision, Ethical Context: Novalis and Artistic Autonomy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 36 and following. Novalis, following Fichte, elevates the transcendental imagination as the faculty that brings together these oppositions - and Schiller as articulating the synthesis as a matter of art (Kunst). See Fichtestudien 2:294.
78. Likewise see Martin Dyck, Novalis and Mathematics, University of North Carolina Studies in the German Languages and Literature 27 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1960).
79. See the analysis of judgment as differentiation by Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (Albany: SUNY Press), 85 and following. While Frank rightly sees this as a move beyond Fichte, German Idealism, and foundationalism, he likewise analyzes it as a coherence (versus a correspondence) theory. We should perhaps, as does Heidegger, deny the opposition in order to understand historical coherence as a Vorurteil that does not simply determine the (ekstatic) Wechsel and hence, as a result, the potential "correspondence" that intentionally emerges internal to judgment itself.
80. Martin Heidegger, "The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus," trans. Roderick M. Stuart and John van Buren, m Martin Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 62.
81. See Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of German Romanticism, 53.
82. Carolyn Lanchner, "Klee in America," in Paul Klee: His Life and Work (Ostfildern-Ruit: Halje Cantz, 2001), 84.
83. See Heidegger's discussion of reliability in "The Origin of the Work of Art," PLT, beginning at 34.
84. Heidegger, PLT, 73.
85. Heidegger, BT, 76.
86. Heidegger, PLT, 49.
87. Heidegger, QCT, 20.
88. See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 195: ". . . both Hegel and Heidegger, the one with the help of a hypothetical (a probable) etymology, the other by a verbal analysis, created these words, philosophically or poetically ..."
89. There isn't space to justify this claim fully here. To start, one could point to Derrida and Deleuze's early treatments of these issues in Nietzsche. Still, the interplay between quality and quantity, the boundaries of the immanent and the transcendent (the ontic and the ontological) was at issue from the outset in post-Kantian thought concerning the dialectic, perhaps especially in the writings of Fichte and Schlegel (and thereby the romantic's emphasis on irony). An important account of this conceptual development remains Lukacs'. For the issue here this is especially true of his analysis of the postkantian's recourse to the mathematical infinite for, to use Fichte's terms, a "backwards or forward," model for overcoming dogmatism. See Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 215.
90. Also see Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 128-9.
91. Such recourse perdures beyond classical German thought. Arguably, this same problem remains at stake, for example, in Husserl's move from static to "genetic" phenomenology or in Heidegger's account of the hermeneutic circle. For the latter see my "Our 'Reciprocal Rejoinder' with the Past: On Heidegger's Erwiderung," Tradition(s) Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical Germany Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), Introduction.
92. Heidegger. PIA, 27.
93. Heidegger, QCT, 39.
94. Ibid., 48.
95. Ibid., 43.
96. See WCT, 138.
97. Paul Mee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, trans. P. Schneider, R. R. Zachary, and M. Knight (Berkeley: university of California Press, 1964), 317.
98. Ibid.
99. Heidegger, PLT. 4.
100. Compare Wittgenstein's Tractatus 4.1212: "What can be shown cannot be said;" 6.2331: "Calculation is not an experiment." While calculation is not an experiment (calculation has a different outcome, as he puts it elsewhere), 'calculating,' that is, its 'use,' can be.
101. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 79, 171.
102. See Pöggeler, "Heidegger on Art," 113.
103. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 3.
104. Heidegger, S, 81.
105. Being and Time itself uses Feld in a number of senses. For example, describing its own project, the Daseinanalytik begins by saying that we can claim to provide answers to the question "What is Being?" "only if the question of Being has been reawakened and we have arrived at a field where we can come to terms with it in a way that can be controlled."
106. See Heidegger, BT, 49. At the same time, however, the Umwelt's existentialia of ready-to-hand and present-to-hand is characterized as a "field" that we encounter. Ibid., 305.
107. Heidegger, S, 81; cf. BT, 201 and following.
108. Merleau-Ponty, PoP, 102. For Merleau-Ponty this entailed that the synthesis involved must be corporeal: "But the point-horizon structure can teach us what a point is only in virtue of the maintenance of a hither zone of corporeality from which to be seen, and round about it indeterminate horizons which are the counter part of this spectacle." Ibid., 102. Heidegger, following Nietzsche, would agree in understanding life as the "bodying forth" and "schematizing" of chaos. See Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 3, trans. Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1987), 78-83. Cited hereafter as N 3.
109. Heidegger, S, 76.
110. Ibid.
111. Heidegger, BT, 414.
112. Heidegger, FCM, 191.
113. Heidegger, BT, 29.
114. Heidegger, FCM, 189.
115. Ibid., 216.
116. Ibid., 189-91.
117. Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 114.
118. Klee, N, 76-7.
119. On the notion of "ruinance" see Heidegger, PIA, ch. 2.
120. See my "Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism and Philosophy, Towards A Non-Prosaic Conception of Consciousness," in Issues in Interpretation Theory, ed. Pol Vandevelde (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, forthcoming).
121. See Heidegger's description of thinking as "thane" in WCT, 140.
122. Klee, N, 66.
123. Merleau-Ponty, PoP, 54, 383 and following. Without denying the truth of formalism, formalism, that is, would not constitute the whole (or the "essence") of mathematics, any more than it would poiesis.
124. Heidegger, QCT, 34.
125. Heidegger, PLT, 82.
126. Indeed Merleau-Ponty invokes this term in "rendering" Klee's "Creative credo" into French in his L'oeil et l'esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 74.