Gadamer, aesthetic modernism, and the rehabilitation of allegory: The relevance of Paul Klee

Research in Phenomenology

Volumn 34, Issue 1, 2004, Pages 45-72

  Watson, Stephen H ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME   (United States)

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EID: 61149230112     PISSN: 00855553     EISSN: 15691640     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/1569164042404617     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Athenaeum Fragments, #58, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 25.
2. See Rene Crevel, Paul Klee (Paris: Gallimard, 1930);
3. translated by Gert Schiff under the title "Rene Crevel as a Critic of Paul Klee," Arts Magazine 52 (1977): 136.
4. Klee letter to Marc, June 8, 1915, cited in O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Kite's Career, 1914-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 269 n. 86. For Werckmeister's analysis, see 56f.
5. Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Art (London, 1959), 186.
6. See Fichte, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 128-29.
7. For further discussion of this issue, see Rainer Crone, "Cosmic Fragments of Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul Klee," in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
8. Jean Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), 29.
9. The link between phenomenology and optics (perspectivism, theoretical or experiential) had been explicit throughout its history, beginning with Lambert. See my Extensions. Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), chap. 8.
10. See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 61.
11. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), 40.
12. Klee's Bauhaus theory course was modeled after Fux's fundamental musical counterpoint manual Gradus ad Pamassum (1720).
13. The stated goal of this work was "to work out a method similar to that by which children learn, first letters, then syllables, and finally how to read and write." See A. Kagen, "Paul Klee's 'Ad Parnassum': The Theory and Practice of Eighteenth Century Polyphany as Models for Paul Klee's Art," Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (1977): 92.
14. Elsewhere I have further explored dris compositional account in relation to Merleau-Ponty's reading of Klee. See my "On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Adorno and Merleau-Ponty's Readings of Paul Klee," Chiasmi International 5 (2003): 201-20.
15. For example, in a 1987 interview with Klaus Davi, Gadamer claimed that "American art has been very ably puffed up by the media, but it has never produced anything of real significance, nothing that a hermeneutic analysis can't classify as pure imitation." See Flash Art no. 136 (1987): 79.
16. See Regine Prange, Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol: Bruno Taut und Paul Klee (Hildescheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1991), chap. 1.
17. Werkmeister, The Making of Paul Kee's Career, 418.
18. See "Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode" The Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978): 10, letter of Gadamer to Strauss, 5 April 1961 (Gadamer's emphasis).
19. O. K. Werckmeister, "Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History," Oppositions, no. 25 (fall 1982): 104, Werkmeister's (Benjaminian) view is not uncontroversial.
20. See Donat de Chapeaurouge, Paul Klee und der christliche Himmel (Stuttgart Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), 53.
21. On the notion of reciprocal rejoinder see my Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), Inroduction; hereafter cited as Traditions(s) I.
22. See G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature, pt. 2 of Encyclopedia, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 293.
23. As the correspondence reveals, Adorno had urged Benjamin to undertake a critical analysis of Jung - and the latter himself regarded such a study as assisting in providing the "epistemological foundations" of the Arcades Project. See Theador Adorno and Walter Benjamin: The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 61f., 201.
24. See C. J. Jung, Symbols of Transformation, trans. R. F. C. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956). Klee's more mystical views are perhaps at least as easily accessed here, as interpreters have suggested - rather than Benjamin's angelology of historical materialism.
25. E. Husserl, The Crisis of The European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 387.
26. See my "The Rationality of the Fragment," in Extensions, chap. 10.
27. For further discussion of such "non-contemporaneity," see my Tradition(s) II: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), Introduction.
28. This "exhibitive disparting" is Heidegger's characterization of the complex 'synthesis' of judgment. See The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 209.
29. For further discussion of this account, see my "Heidegger, Rationality, and the Critique of Judgement," Review of Metaphysics 61, no. 3 (March 1988).
30. "The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. This way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it" (D, 192).
31. See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1973), 54-55.
32. At stake here is not so much a 'religious' claim as a conceptual claim, one that follows Gadamer's invocation of the analogia entis in the third Kritik; but this "retrieval" and "dispersion of the sacred" is even more explicit in the Dialectic of the Second Kritik, See my Tradition(s) I, chap. 2, "Kant, the Architectonics of Reason, and the Ruins of the Ancient Systems: On the Symbolics of Law." For its implications for a theory of hermeneutics, see my "Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred," in Extensions, chap. 3.
33. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 54.
34. Cf. TM, 122
35. and Gadamer, "Concerning Empty and Ful-filled Time," trans. R. P. O'Hara, in Martin Heidegger in Europe and America, ed. E. G. Ballard and C. E. Scott (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973).
36. See Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 393-94: "This contemporaneity with the great moments of myth is an indispensible condition for any form of magico-religious efficaciousness. Seen in this light, Soren Kierkegaard's effort to express the Christian status as 'being contemporary with Jesus' is less revolutionary than it at first sounds; all Kierkegaard has done is to formulate in new words an attitude common and normal to primitive man." Eliade himself argued in favor of such 'primitive sacrality' over against Heideggerian historicism. Still, he acknowledged elsewhere that "Hermeneutics - the science of interpretation - is the Western man's reply - the only intelligent reply - to the demands of contemporary history, to the fact the West is committed (one might be tempted to say 'condemned') to a confrontation with the cultural values of the 'others'."
37. See forward to The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 11.
38. The agonistic perhaps lies at the heart of hermeneutics, however. Paul Ricoeur, for example, links hermeneutics to a "transcendental deduction" of the symbol explicitly understood in terms of Eliade's notion of hierophany in the conclusion of his The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 347ff.
39. Yet it is precisely at this point that Adorno invokes Benjamin's concept of allegory to criticize Kierkegaard's account of contemporaneity and the doctrine of the instant. See his Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hallot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 54.
40. In either case the conceptual adumbrations involve - and without dissolving their evidence - a certain "wager," to use a term Ricoeur invokes (The Symbolism of Evil, 355).
41. It is precisely in this sense, as Benjamin puts it in a passage in the Arcades Project, immediately following a characterization of Heidegger (as the "[s]ecularization of history in Heidegger"), that "Goethe saw it coming: the crisis in bourgeois education [Bildung]" (AP, 472). Klee's late work, as is often recognized (inter alia, it was what fascinated Heidegger), was often preoccupied with the figures (and fate) of death (cf. Sees It Coming). And yet, like Goethe, Klee continually articulates nature as Urphenomenon in another sense, one Gadamer's account of him fully affirmed. Indeed a 1929 work entitled "Crystalline Landscape" exhibits precisely the Darstellung that Gadamer claimed restrictedly as Klee's point. In these works, beyond the allegorical dissonances of works such as the Angelus Novus, still precisely consistent with the pedagogical strategy of the Bauhaus based on counterpart, Klee seems to reinvoke, to cite the title of a 1925 abstract work, "Ancient Harmony" (Alter Klang). In any case, we should doubtless be leery of Benjamin's characterization of "secularization" here, for the reason we have already said: "theology" - at least in Benjamin's sense - seems no more absent in Heidegger than in Gadamer: indeed that was the point of understanding interpretation as an event, an Ereignis, to use Heidegger's term. But as we have seen, this Ereignis is clearly there in Goethe's own characterization - on Benjamin reading: a beauty that "remains true to its essential nature only when veiled" [in dem Unzugängliche Ereignis wird) (IL, 199).