Heidegger’s Prophecy: Art and Technology
by Alan N. Shapiro
(thanks to Mary Fox for contributing valuable ideas)
In seminal lectures delivered in the late 1930s – “The Age of the World Picture” (1938) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1936) – the philosopher Martin Heidegger delineated what he believed to be the “essence of modernity” and pointed the way to an original exit from modernity onto a “generalized reflection (Besinnung) on everything” for which modernity paved the way and which was its secret destiny. “Man will know the incalculable,” writes Heidegger, “that is, safeguard it in its truth – only in creative questioning and forming from out of the power of genuine reflection.” At that moment in history, true thinking would begin again. “What fear is today greater than the fear of thinking?”1
It is important that Heidegger uses the word Besinnung, which, in addition to reflection, also has connotations of consciousness, mindfulness, contemplation, meditation, and ‘coming to one’s senses’. Jemanden zur Besinnung bringen – bring someone to his senses. Stunde der Besinnung – the hour of enlightenment, of illumination.
The “essential ground” of modernity does not lie in humanity’s having freed itself from the bonds of oppression of the Middle Ages, but instead resides in the foundational relationship between knowledge and its objects that modern science and academic research exemplify. Heidegger both admired and decried this setting up of “man the subject” as the center of being, a “setting-up” in front of “that-which-lies-before” that has general consequences for the “understanding of being as a whole.” Heidegger gives us a precise ambivalent conceptualization and evaluation of modernity — civilization and its discontents.
In his appreciation for what is original in the work of art, what is truly an origin, Heidegger offers a clear hint as to what the universal of Western metaphysics is leading towards. A secret prophecy: a renaissance in our relationship to being, a dwelling within the world itself rather than the postulation of a universe. Theoretical physicists like Stephen Hawking, please take note: there is not so much of a dualism or binary opposition between science and literature as you may think, the universe is more of a fiction (a construction, a model) than an objectively real thing-in-itself. The world is my limit; the universe is a projection of a certain abstractly constituted (Western imperialist) subject.
“For what is happening now is the melting down of the self-completing essence of modernity into the obvious (das Selbstverständliche, the self-evident). Only when this is secured as a worldview will the possibility arise of a fertile ground for being to become capable of a primal questioning — a question-worthiness…”2 The best episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, “The City on the Edge of Forever”: The Guardian of Forever Time Portal: A resonant electronic voice begins to speak. It emanates from a dusty cube sitting next to the large, irregularly shaped, enigmatic annulus: “A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space, and before your race was born, I have awaited a question.”
The Conquest of the World As Picture
Modernity is also characterized by the conquering of extreme dimensions, the very large and the very small, the gigantic and the infinitesimal. Das Riesenhafte is brought to the center of our attention as thinkers, writes Heidegger, owing to the way that distances and otherness become implicated in a process of disappearance initiated by the technologies of transportation and telecommunications, the airplane and the radio, the media. Here there is a serious mistake in the English translation of “The Age of the World Picture” published by the Cambridge University Press, which inexplicably renders Rundfunk (radio broadcasting) as “the flick of a switch.”3 Heidegger’s remark in this context shoots an arrow straight into the heart of the problem of the disappearance of reality triggered by the mass media taken as a whole, “in the representations of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness produced at will by radio broadcasting.”4
Everyday life in modern workaholic and bureaucratic society revolves around planning, calculating, establishing, and securing. But “the gigantic and the seemingly completely calculable become, through this shift, incalculable. This incalculability becomes the invisible shadow cast over all things when man has become the subiectum and world has become picture.”5 Star Trek episodes like Voyager’s “Year of Hell” demonstrate deep ambivalance towards ‘hypermodern’ technosciences like quantum mechanics, chaos theory, hyper-dimensionality, supercomputing virtual reality, and genetic engineering. Worries are expressed about the dangerous disturbances to reality resulting from the working up of the sciences of complexity and uncertainty into technologies, leading to new forms of paradoxical domination and destruction. Yet according to Heidegger, out of the essence of modernity will emerge the Event: Das Ereignis.
“When we reflect on the modern age, we inquire after the modern world picture. We characterize this by contrasting it with the world picture of the Middle Ages and of antiquity.”6 How would it be possible for a new world picture to emerge? Would it be a change similar to what Foucault prophesied when he spoke of the end of the era of man, the appearance of some kind of posthumanism, or perhaps what Nietzsche implied when he wrote about the overman? The answer is no. Much of modernism – democracy, capitalism, and yes, even shopping malls and media technology – is a great achievement for humanity. “Does every historical epoch have its world picture — have it in such a way, indeed, so as, from time to time, to concern itself about that picture? Or is it only a modern kind of representing that inquires into a world picture?”7 The worldview which is that of the world picture emerges with modernity, and there is no going beyond it because it is an irrevocable gain.
Other historical epochs also had world pictures, but they were not recursively or self-reflexively aware of the fact of having one, nor of the content of what their world picture was. Modernity has invented the mode of knowledge that is the world picture. It is the only epoch that has conceived of the world as picture, yet it is not the only epoch that has a world picture. We value the notion of world picture as an accomplishment of the modern West, and value also the insight that this attainment gives us about previous epochs, such as antiquity and the Middle Ages. Yet the current world picture of the West is not the non plus ultra of all possible world pictures. The very idea of world picture, in Heidegger’s estimation, provides us with the additional idea that a better world picture, from the point of view of a better life for ourselves, for beings, and for the planet, is possible. To get there, Heidegger implies, we would want to begin to de-emphasize the “picture” aspect of world picture. We can reconfigure media technology (essentially from the spectacle of television to the literary creativity and participatory activism of embodied-immersive virtual reality). We also want to change our mode of knowledge. Science can undergo a paradigm shift. Philosophy can leave philosophy. Radical thought will become more radical yet at the same time go mainstream. Social, political and economic organization will be put on the table for questioning again. There will be a generalized reflection.
Let me repeat it. For Heidegger, the very idea of a world picture is born simultaneously with our specific world picture. World picture is both general and specific. We have the idea that there are different world pictures in different historical epochs, and we have our specific world picture – that of modernity or of what one might call the universal. The ancient and medieval world pictures could, before this, never have been conceived as such. They come into view as world pictures only retrospectively, by virtue of the fact that we now have conceived the idea of world picture. While troubling in its specificity for Heidegger, the idea of world picture is at the same time a win. The general sensitivity to world pictures gives Heidegger hope of a “better” world picture yet to come — that of the world itself in its radical illusion (Baudrillard, the TV show Lost), something akin to Derrida’s différance, a generalized reflection on everything, a more radical ecological relationship of the human being with other beings, a going beyond of metaphysics, philosophy leaving philosophy to engage with all other fields of knowledge. A “better” world picture yet to come — implicit in the development of the West and which will grow out of the West. And out of the East.
Martin Heidegger decries “the pictorial character of the world as the representedness of beings,” the process of the world becoming picture and man becoming subject. The interweaving of these two developments “illuminates the founding process of modern history.” “The world, as conquered, stands at man’s disposal.” “The fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the world as picture.”8 This first usage of ‘world’ by Heidegger is related to our usage of ‘global’ or ‘universal’. It is the world as information, or as object of our penetrating gaze, forced to submit to us.
Yet the term ‘world’, in a second usage, is “a name for beings in their entirety.” Dasein. He elaborates: “The term is not confined to the cosmos, to nature. History, too, belongs to world. But even nature and history – interpenetrating in their suffusion and exceeding of each other – do not exhaust world. Under this term we also include the world-ground, no matter how its relation to world is thought.”9 Nature, history, and even something that exceeds both.
Heidegger’s concept of world suggests an approach to research that is post-academic, living through the crisis of the previously convenient split between science and the humanities. Science and history are not at all two separate fields. ‘World’ is both a conceptual framework and the ground providing the ‘hospitality’ for a different way of living one’s life and of knowing. The ‘world’ part of “world picture” implies a going beyond of the emphasis on picture, on the representational, filmic, panoramic, bird’s eye view.
The Ereignis is a clearing that the path leading out of the woods of Western metaphysics opens onto. Yet this clearing is reached only through a double movement of disclosure and concealment. Trick or treat. “The clearing occurs (geschieht) only as this twofold concealment. The unconcealment of beings – this is never a state that is merely present but rather a happening.”10 See you at Woodstock. The openness of concealment means a dialectic of total sincere honesty and the stealth forms of fatal strategies. It might be a publishing house whose books pop into and out of existence; the tomes are not available via the normal “consumer palace” distribution channels. Or a software company that activates Artificial Intelligence as nuggets of highly energized code, added inverse-Kryptonite value gifted to the customers without them even having asked for it.
The Artwork as Original
We are interested in a new kind of post-academic knowledge that respects the truth of beings, that is “on the side of” beings, a knowledge contrasted to the knowledge that dominates beings via the prioritizing of our subjecthood. We are interested in the advent of this new kind of knowledge, how this is taking place here and now in the history of the West (and the East, North, and South). We see and hear this materialization in the artwork – but not in the artwork of “conscious Cartesian artists,” of “I think, therefore I am”; on the contrary, we sense this emergence in art itself as an objective process of the world-that-is-thinking (Rothko, Malevich…). “The essential nature of art would then be this: the setting-itself-to-work of the truth of beings.” Heidegger continues: “Yet until now art has had to do with the beautiful and with beauty – not with truth.”11 Beauty is in the eye of the beholder; truth encompasses beauty, yet also requires the forging of a mindfulness-connection between the thinking, pulsating brain and all of the senses. I focus awareness on my optic nerve, inner ear canal, elbow-joint and hand nerves, on my tongue and nostrils, therefore I am.
In speaking about the origin of the work of art, Heidegger is really speaking about the artwork as original (and as beyond explanation). Fully conscious of Derrida’s correct critique of phallogocentrism, I speak paradoxically here, against the academic doxa, of Heidegger’s assertion as an act of speaking not of writing. In speaking about the artwork, Heidegger – he who is a he – is not just speaking about any artwork. He is speaking about the coming-to-presence of the artwork. The daring escape not as escape but as the gathering up of the essence of what one flees from, flight not as fugitive but as the noble establishing of the flight.
The Original Artwork does not come from “an Artist”
“Modern subjectivism, of course, misinterprets creation as the product of the genius of the self-sovereign subject.” “The work,” on the other hand, “opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force.”12 In the TV show Lost, we see the operation of this objective creativity recursively, or in a double, over-determined way. The Island of Lost is a world created, opened up by a collaboration of human creators (producers J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, etc.) and the authorless artwork of the world; but the world that is opened, and held open, is the world itself, the world itself in its radical illusion (the later Baudrillard), the constellation of the mystery (Heidegger), the mustering of the forces of the West, just East of the Dateline, in concentrated form on an Island. As in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe story, the philosophico-epistemological, socio-political-economic, and technological principles of West and East are consolidated, the essence of them distilled and brought up for review, getting down to brass tacks.
The work sets up a world, but in the Event, the world that is set up is the world itself. As Heidegger says: “world worlds” (in German, Welt weltet). Noun and verb, subject and predicate. Being, BEING, BE-ings. There is a physical space (spaciousness, Geräumigkeit) which is unsealed in worlding (welten as verb). The physical space on the Island, more specifically on the Beach, that protected zone between the twin dangers of the Ocean and the Forest, is that of the fold that gets unfolded.
Enacting The Tension between Earth and World
The double-movement between concealment and disclosure is also the tension between earth and world. The created or emerged world is only the genuine Event, the real deal, when the emanation of that world takes place within the context of the resistance of the Earth, only within their struggle. “The earth is openly illuminated as itself only where it is apprehended and preserved as the essentially undisclosable.”13 The Earth shields itself from disclosure and only reveals itself step-by-step in the form of a treasure hunt. It is exactly like the Search for the Buried Treasure in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. All the detective work that one does to find that X marks the spot is the journey of the Nietzschean child willing to wander off the beaten track like the young Jim Hawkins.
The Earth is “effortless and untiring,” but the work “lets the earth be an earth.” In relation to truth(s) – the singularity of that truth’s otherness, the universality for mankind and for beings of the Truth of each truth – the Earth is paradoxical, seemingly yet not really contradictory. The deep real history of each struggle embedded in the earth. The truth-value of each singular grounded tradition/religion/philosophy/fight for humanity-coming-together in a world ready to join the United Federation of Planets. “World and earth are essentially different and yet never separated from one another. World is grounded on earth, and earth rises up through world.”14 What is the relationship between work, earth, and world? The world instigates a salutary strife between earth and work, from which arises pure originality (i.e., ART). It is the ménage à trois of the setting forth of earth (das Herstellen der Erde), the setting up of a world (das Aufstellen einer Welt), and art: the setting-to-work of truth (Ins-Werk-Setzen der Wahrheit). “The work-being of the work consists in fighting the fight between world and earth. It is because the strife reaches its peak in the simplicity of intimacy that the unity of the work happens in the fighting of the fight.”15 A new planetary fight expressing the deepest respect for all the local historical fights (Tibetan Buddhism, Native American Indian beliefs, African American soul music, Jewish Kabbalah, Irish rebel spirit, Antonin Artaud and Kathy Acker, to name a few of many).
We must indeed be in very close proximity to the coming-to-world of the essence of truth in the continuous opposition/juxtaposition/alteration between clearing and concealment. This accounts for the uninterrupted tension or suspense in Lost (just as a close reading of Star Trek demonstrates how the new comes into the world). Scientists and technologists like Vernor Vinge or Ray Kurzweil who speculate about the coming Singularity but who exclude major philosophers like Heidegger from their reading lists are making a major mistake. One must engage with all of contemporary knowledge. “It is striking to me that there are so many people, highly trained in technoscience,” writes Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “who consider the emergence of the Singularity likely to happen, not as metaphor, but in concrete physical terms on our plane of material existence, just as did the Internet and the Genome Project, or indeed as did writing and language.”16 Science fiction is just as important as science “fact” for understanding the coming singularity. The literature and literary theory side of SF is just as important as is the technology side.
My interpretation here is different from how the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” has usually been read before. By bringing this piece together with the companion lecture “The Origin of the World Picture,” I seek a contextualization of what Heidegger is saying about art in all of the philosopher’s concerns at that time, orbiting around the Ereignis, practicing a recursive Heideggerian reading of Heidegger. Chapter 7 of Mark Wrathall’s book How To Read Heidegger, entitled “Truth and Art,” can be taken as typical of academic interpretations.17 Wrathall divides up Heidegger into the ‘philosophy of x, y, and z’ – art, language, and technology in successive chapters – each to be considered as a separate reflection by Mister Professional Philosopher. This is a reduction of Heidegger to the analytical approach.
The choreographer and dance theorist Kirsi Monni, founding member of the Zodiak Center for New Dance in Helsinki, has commented on Heidegger’s theory of art:
Heidegger asks how metaphysics has pushed us to encounter reality, and he answers that it has done so in such a way that our involvement in the mutual ground of being has been forgotten. Heidegger argues that the tradition of aesthetics relies upon platonic metaphysics in which reality is revealed to us through the distinction between the supra-sensible (ideal) and sensible (material) realms. The truth is found from the supra-sensible realm of permanent ideas, from which sensible matter is only a shadow. This is the metaphysical ground which continued to inform the conceptual model of artworks throughout Western history: an artwork is formed matter which allows the supra-sensible to shine through it; an artwork imitates reality, which is revealed through conception of the right idea; an artwork is a symbol, an allegory, a metaphor, a representation.18
This “basically mimetic way of understanding art” is consistent with the detachment of our brains from our bodies. Monni (and fellow Finnish philosopher Jaana Parviainen) write(s) about the rediscovery of thinking-in-movement (a phrase taken from the Alexander Technique). Yet the last long sentence of the passage cited above is too negative about Western artworks. Truly Conscious Art which attempts to express the view from “over there” can be mimetic of the expansive multiplicity of our BE-ing, as opposed to our being.
I will fin(n)ish this essay with a little ditty about my eyes and ears.
I was wandering in a Jamaican neighborhood in Brooklyn, looking in grocery stores at objects and products which I had never seen in the chain supermarkets where I normally shopped. I was moonstruck not only by the unusual foodstuffs, but by the variety of colors. There were colors and patterns – on packages, fresh produce, and other artefacts – belonging to portions of the spectrum which I had not noticed before. Lime, crème, razzle dazzle, sunshine yellow, lava lava, sky blue, lollipop swirl, amber tropics, black-fuchsia, red flowers, orange-mandarian. Suddenly I felt as if a wax stuffing, a bland blurriness, a stale neutrality, had been lifted from my eyes. From living my entire life within the workaday functionality of this society, I had apparently developed a self-protection against the visual vitality of the world. The ‘sense of the world’ (Jean-Luc Nancy) was much richer, surprising and variegated than I had been physio-psychologically trained for. Now the blinders obstructing my perception – diminishing the visible to digitalized-informational drabness – were removed.
But then I put the blinders back on. Oh just for maybe another couple of decades or so. I am no “great man changing the twenty-first century.” A Jew could never be that. I was not freed by my eye-opening experience. Liberating my eyes and connecting thinking to seeing will be a challenge for everyday practice for the rest of my life.
The liberation of my vision was an idea introduced into the world. That was its power. The diamond. Like my crazy science fictional idea that the Nazis have by no means definitively won against us Jews because it is feasible and plausible that my friends and I are going to invent time travel and teleportation and beam the six million Holocaust victims out of there to safety in the future before Hitler can get them. This nutty idea is more plausible than it was five years ago because I have now written and published two books.19 Five or ten years from now it will be even more plausible.
I live with a lot of conscious and unconscious fear because Hitler killed the Jews, and I am living in the country where this took place. To reduce my fear, I have discovered the secret path leading to undo the Holocaust. Derrida (and his traces, die Spur) was my first teacher here. Invent time travel and teleportation. Start forgiving the Nazis now, because I want to live with qualitatively less fear and more joy. As Jeffrey Gormly writes: “It is in our imagination that true revolution will take place. Let us clear the slate and start again, and start with our true deep desires, imagining.”
Hearing. Sounds in the world. Music. I think that all my life I had a too negative relationship to noise in the world.20 I was especially sensitive to noise from construction sites, and from ventilators in hotel rooms. Many times, in specific noise circumstances, I even thought: “why was I cursed with ears so I have to hear this loud noise?” What is the relationship between music that we love and noises that we “don’t like”? Now I am listening to beautiful guitar music. Now I am listening to the upstairs neighbor hammering away. It is OK. I am listening to the birds singing. Sylvia borin. Sylvia atricapilla. Sylvia communis. Sylvia curruca. Locustella naevia. Acrocephalus palustris. Acrocephalus scirpaeceus. Acrocephalus arundianceus. Hippolais icterina. Phylloscopus trochilus.
To recalibrate my ears to the sounds of the world, to live more in harmony with my environment, to live this relationship in a more positive way, is to make the subtlest of absolutely necessary adjustments. Not an easy thing. The Buddha is sometimes very tricky, devilish. It is a baptism of fire, an initiation, an impossibly possible rite of passage.
NOTES
1 – Heidegger, Martin, “The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Age of the World Picture,” in Off the Beaten Track (edited and translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, originally published in German in 1950) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002); pp.72,50.
2 – Ibid., p.85.
3 – Ibid., p.71. durch den Rundfunk: See “Die Zeit des Weltbildes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1950); p.95.
4 - Heidegger, Off the Beaten Track; p.71.
5 – Ibid., p.72.
6 – Ibid., p.67.
7 – Ibid.
8 – Ibid., pp.69,71.
9 – Ibid., p.67.
10 – Ibid., pp.30-31.
11 – Ibid., p.16.
12 – Ibid., pp.20,48,22.
13 – Ibid., p.25.
14 – Ibid., p.26.
15 – Ibid., p.27.
16 – Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); p.263.
17 – Mark Wrathall, How To Read Heidegger (London: Granta Books, 2005).
18 – Kirsi Monni, “About the Sense and Meaning in Dance,” in Framemakers: Choreography As An Aesthetics of Change (edited by Jeffrey Gormly) (Limerick: Daghdha Dance Company, 2008); p.38.
19 – This sentence is false. My second book, “Betting on Longshots,” remains unpublished.
20 - “To escape from nervous fatigue in modern life is a very difficult thing. In the first place, all through working hours, and still more in the time spent between work and home, the urban worker is exposed to noise, most of which, it is true, he learns not to hear consciously, but which none the less wears him out, all the more owing to the subconscious effort involved in not hearing it.” Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (London: Allen & Unwin, 1930) (from Chapter 5: Fatigue).
