Chapter 5
The Void
By differentiating himself from the Ohioan landscape, Newman did not simply underscore modern humanity’s decreasing connection with things natural. Given his fascination with beginnings, he also aspired to recapitulate the state of original man. In fact, the revelation he experienced in Ohio echoes statements the artist already made in 1947 regarding the elemental condition of early humanity. In “The First Man Was an Artist,” he declared, “Original man, shouting his consonants, did so in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void.”1 In effect, paintings such as Onement and Be arguably visualize the vulnerable state of early hominids confronting the wide expanses and ultimate strangeness of nature. Awareness of self, for Newman, is predicated upon an awareness of our place in the world, but that same awareness, conversely, is a reminder of our inescapable difference and separateness. No wonder Newman’s ambition was to instill in the spectator the feeling “of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.”2 When writing about Amlash sculpture, Newman exclaimed how “refreshing” it was to see artists for whom art embodied a “declaration of man’s nature against Nature.”3 Newman’s view, again, strikes a compelling parallel with Heidegger’s attempt to “exhibit the specific characteristics of the being of Da-sein qua Da-sein as opposed to the characteristics of the being of what is not Da-sein, for instance, nature.”4
This opposition, of course, is purely arbitrary. Some belief systems count human beings as integral to nature’s fabric, and others as separate, indivisible entities (recall our example that half a bowl of cereal is still cereal but half a person is not a person). Depending upon our cultural baggage, we see ourselves relating to nature one way or the other. Yet, as Steven Pinker contends, if human beings could discern “the crystals, fibers, cells, and atoms making up matter,” we might never have developed such distinctions in the first place. The cleavage in our minds, he continues, “is not just unfettered by the object-substance distinction in the world; it is unfettered by the physical world altogether.”5 Unfettered though it may be, this distinction helps conceptualize our subjective reactions to the natural. To Heidegger’s mind, humanity sees itself as different, as a species whose essence lies in its existence, whose antecedent understanding of which sets it apart, and whose way of Being transcends that of ordinary beings. Humanity feels not just different from, it also feels not at home in, the world, explaining Heidegger’s sympathy with Novalis’s view that philosophy is a form of homesickness. What emerges from philosophical questioning is “the ultimate solitariness of man, in which he stands for him- or herself as someone unique in the face of the whole [i.e., the world].”6 Since humanity is mindful and conscious, it thus stands—and feels itself—apart from that which is unmindful and unconscious. A keen feeling of one’s own presence, therefore, stems from differentiating the “here” from the “there” both spatially and existentially. If Newman titled some of his works Here (figure 4.1), Right Here, and Not There-Here (figure 4.2), it is precisely to convey what he construed as the metaphysical implications of place: the absolute difference and utter loneliness of the human in the midst of the nonhuman. Likewise, Heidegger wrote that Da-sein understands “its here in terms of the over there of the surrounding world. The here does not mean the where of something objectively present, but the where of de-distancing being with . . . together with this de-distancing. In accordance with its spatiality, Da-sein is initially never here but over there.”7 “From this over there,” however, Da-sein “comes back to its here, and it does this only by interpreting its heedful being toward something in terms of what is at hand over there.”8
Heidegger’s wording is again metaphorical. “Here” and “there” are states of Being, not literal locations in space: “where we already are, we are in such a way that at the same time we are not there, because we ourselves have not yet properly reached what concerns our being.”9 Unfortunately for the present argument, the 1962 John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson translation of Being and Time in Newman’s library—unlike the more recent translation by Joan Stambaugh quoted above—translates the German Dort (there) with the more archaic “yonder.”10 But although the contrast between “here” and “yonder” is not as close to the exact wording of Newman’s title Not There-Here, the implications are the same. In fact, the same terms were used in Ralph Manheim’s 1959 translation of An Introduction to Metaphysics, where he explains that Heidegger’s Da-sein “means man’s conscious, historical existence in the world, which is always projected into a there beyond its here.”11 Given the difficulty of Heidegger’s language, it is useful to reiterate, if only parenthetically, that some translators have rendered Da-sein as “to be there,” “being-there,” or even “There-being.”12 Although the term “Da” in German can be used, depending on the context, to evoke both “here” and “there,” Michael Gelven persuasively argues that the “here” has priority over the “there.”13 Recalling Newman’s admission that “Here I am, here . . . and out beyond there there is chaos, nature rivers, landscapes,” Gelven makes the point that the da of Da-sein should be interpreted as “Here I am, open to possibilities!”14
But just as we can be “here,” open to possibilities, we can also be oblivious to them. In which case, although we exist “here” in a literal sense, we can also be “elsewhere.” It often happens, Heidegger observes, that in conversation with others, we are “not there,” we are “absent, albeit without having fallen asleep. This not-being-there, this being-away, has nothing at all to do with consciousness or unconsciousness in the usual sense.”15 Heidegger thus uses terms such as “being-there” or “not-being-there” to measure the degree of Da-sein’s involvement and intensity, as well as its openness to possibilities. If we think of an extreme case of madness, he adds, we say, “The person is de-ranged, displaced, away and yet there.”16 This means that Da-sein can be “over there” only because it can also be “here.” A stone or animal cannot be “here” in this sense because it cannot be “over there” either. Being “away” pertains to, and is even inseparable from, the human condition as much as being “here.” Both belong to the Being of Da-sein: “Being away is itself a way of man’s being. Being away does not mean: no being at all. It is rather a way of Da-sein’s being-there. The stone, in its being away, is precisely not there. Man however must be there in order to be away, and so long as he is there does he in general have the possibility of an ‘away.’”17
Although translations are unfortunately confusing when the difference between being “here” versus “there” is sometimes transcribed as that between being “there” versus “away,” especially in view of Gelven’s point that to stress the “there” over the “here” is distortive, what emerges unequivocally is the extent to which both Newman and Heidegger deploy spatial orientation, metaphorically, to convey existential quandaries. If we examine the “here/there” dichotomy against the proposition that Heidegger is devising is a spatiality of involvement, then the “here” represents that realm where we are close to things, when we bring things within the orbit of our concern. The “there” is its opposite: a state where closeness and concern neither sway nor affect our existence. As a result, moving from the “there” to the “here”—from lethargic indifference to a meaningful form of engagement—is emblematic of an awakened form of existence. In the same way as Heidegger hoped that “From this over there,” Da-sein “comes back to its here, and it does this only by interpreting its heedful being toward something in terms of what is at hand over there,” Newman titled a painting Not There-Here (figure 4.2) to incite a pulling back from our state of “being away” and reclaim our involvement in the “here.” When Heidegger uses the term “at hand,” for example, he often means that which is used and manipulated. By asking us to return to the “here” from what is “at hand over there,” Heidegger is suggesting that instead of taking a functional, almost exploitative, attitude toward things in the world, we need to bring aspects of the world within our care, a form of concern that invites a more meaningful and authentic way of relating to the world.
Along such lines, the distinction between the “here” and the “there” does not simply represent the self versus the non-self (i.e., Da-sein versus what is not Da-sein) or the distinction between what lies within our care and what does not; the “here” versus the “there” also means, from a Heideggerian standpoint, the distinction between the authentic and the inauthentic self. The difference is between an individual who is resolute and aware, conscious of its possibilities, and one who is insensitive, uninformed, and simply moves with the collective will of the crowd. When Newman declared man to be sublime only insofar as he is aware, we speculate that, for him no less than for Heidegger, the “there” from which man must return is that very inauthentic condition of blind unawareness, a condition preventing us from reaching the sublimity that is our potential—even our responsibility—to achieve. Although we are literally “here” in the spatial sense, for Heidegger, we are almost always emotionally “over there,” involved with what is not Da-sein because we have no other choice but to live in the world. Immersed in day-to-day existence, we lose cognizance of the meaning of Being and never realize our true possibilities. “[S]cattered into the many,” Heidegger writes, we “are absorbed into the dispersion,” but, even so, we can “demand counter-movement against the dispersion, against the falling apart of life.”18 When Newman titled his own works Here or Not There-Here, he seems to be suggesting, as did Heidegger, that it is imperative to return to the metaphorical “here” precisely because we spend most of our lives “over there,” away from the reality of our Being, lost in a state of dispersal and unawareness. On this point, it is instructive to note that, unlike Here III (figure 4.1), which is perfectly symmetrical, Not There-Here (figure 4.2) and Right Here (figure 5.1) are markedly asymmetrical compositions, perhaps Newman’s way of visualizing this very kind of tension. The artist, in fact, commented specifically on this potential dichotomy: “you put something in the middle of the canvas and there it is. That’s focus. Or you put something in each corner and you leave the middle empty. That’s something else.”19 The desire to have “the painting be asymmetrical,” he stated elsewhere, “create[s] a space different from any I had ever done, sort of—off balance.”20
Figure 5.1. Barnett Newman, Right Here (1954), oil on canvas, 50.25 3 35.25 inches. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Gift of Annalee Newman © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
Yve-Alain Bois has already remarked on the importance of symmetry versus asymmetry in Newman’s compositions.21 The symmetrical Onement I (figure 2.1), he writes, functions as “a command to the beholder: Stand there, just in front of it, and you will know exactly where you are, for this will be the middle of your visual field, just as it is the middle of this painting.”22 Given our tendency to recruit the physical as a metaphor for the psychological, it is instructive to consider how terms such as “centered” or “balanced” are employed in everyday discourse. Someone who is “centered” is “inwardly calm and steady,” a person whose “mental and emotional energies [are] well-balanced.”23 Someone who is “balanced” possesses “mental or emotional steadiness.”24 Meyer Schapiro made an equally useful observation about the way artists exploit such associations for expressive purposes: when placed in the middle of a painting, a human figure has a markedly different quality “than when set at the side, even if balanced then by a small detail that adds a weight to the larger void. A visual tension remains, and the figure appears anomalous, displaced, even spiritually strained.” “The tendency to favor an off-axis position,” Schapiro adds, “has been noticed in the drawings of emotionally disturbed children.”25 Newman and Schapiro were friends; the latter even assisted Newman when Erwin Panofsky corrected the artist’s Latin in Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Schapiro, moreover, wrote a perceptive, albeit brief, critique of Heidegger’s essay on art, a piece with which Newman could have been familiar.26 In any case, Schapiro’s observations about visual symmetry are perfectly apposite to Newman’s compositional choice in Onement versus Right Here: the symmetrical compositions endow the beams with stability and permanence, steadfastness and resolution, poise and dignity; the asymmetrical ones with mutability and impermanence, hesitation and doubt, nervousness and tension.
Intriguingly, even if a state of unawareness prevents us from knowing ourselves and fulfilling our potential, a state of awareness forces us to confront the tragedy of our indelible separation from the world. For Newman and Heidegger, humanity’s first vocalizations are nothing if not expressions of this tragic condition. If one conceptualized early humanity “shouting consonants” in “yells of awe and anger” at its “tragic state,” at its own “self-awareness and helplessness before the void [italics mine],”27 the other conceived of the “experience of beings in their Being which comes here to language” as “tragic. . . . [W]e discover a trace of the essence of tragedy, not when we explain it psychologically or aesthetically, but rather only when we consider its essential form, the Being of beings [italics mine].”28 Both Newman and Heidegger see the tragic nature of the human condition being vocalized in language—explaining Heidegger’s statement that language is the house of Being and Newman’s fascination with the “human utterance”—but no less important is relating this idea to the existential connotations extrapolated from the “here” and the “there,” especially as an awareness of self is nothing but a tragic form of loneliness. In his inaugural lecture at Freiburg, moreover, Heidegger maintained that philosophy begins when we are brave enough to “let nothingness encounter us,” an idea echoed in Newman’s suggestion that primal humanity’s self-awareness was vocalized in expressions of “helplessness before the void.” This helplessness works on many levels. We have already related how Da-sein differentiates itself from beings that have no philosophical relationship with the world (e.g., plants or animals). Animals, in effect, can escape neither their instincts nor their environment; they are bound by what Heidegger likes to call a ring of inhibition. By contrast, a free space opens between humans and their world.29 Unlike animals, human beings can see and also see themselves seeing; their very awareness and self-consciousness creates a distance between them and the world. Heidegger calls this condition “freedom.”30
Freedom, however, is difficult to attain. If Newman ascribed our sensations of presence to our separation from nature, he also recognized forces that impede awareness, forces that re-inscribe us in the earth, as it were. Just as Newman stated, “The first man was called Adam. ‘Adam’ means earth but it also means ‘red,’” 31 Heidegger recognized that man can “open up to the vastness of the sky and at the same time be rooted in the dark of the earth.”32 The earth, in this sense, represents that primordial state of oneness with nature from which Adam originally emerged, a state of connectedness, to be sure, but also of oblivion since humanity’s relationship to Being was yet concealed. Standing out in the midst of nature, Adam broke out of this state, grasped his uniqueness, and became self-aware—an act of rivalry and defiance for which he was summarily punished. By virtue of its ability to divorce itself from nature, humanity also achieved freedom, even sublimity; but for all these achievements, it left itself alienated and alone. The prospects are grim: either we belong in an oblivious way, or we stand out in utter isolation.
Emerging from the earth, moreover, is no gentle event (recall that Heidegger sees Being as set apart by conflict, polemos). And, since an awareness of being “thrown” into the word is integral to the very nature of Da-sein, existence manifests itself as a burden. Even if Da-sein attains freedom, it cannot freely decide whether or not to exist; on that score, Da-sein is powerless.33 Newman concurred: “No one gets anybody’s permission to be born. No one asks to live.”34 Under these conditions, deductive or logical reasoning being ineffective, only emotions ignite self-reflection, more specifically, our philosophical anxiety over the burdensome and unjust character of existence. For Heidegger, philosophy begins with mood, with “astonishment, fear, worry, curiosity, jubilation.” 35 For Newman, art is “full of feeling,”36 “the fullness that comes from emotion. . . . I work only out of high passion.”37 Even more compelling, especially in view of Newman’s image of man screaming “consonants . . . in yells of awe and anger at his tragic state, at his own self-awareness and at his own helplessness before the void,” is the following from Heidegger: “When we are caught in the uncaniness of dread, we often try to break the empty silence by words spoken at random, only [proving] the presence of Nothing.”38 These citations reinforce Newman’s view that the first man was an artist because only a being who understands its predicament and can exteriorize it in art and poetry is worthy of the name “man,” just as, for Heidegger, since it is in the nature of Da-sein to question its existence, the first man was something of a poet or philosopher. It is also for this reason that Heidegger called language “the house of Being,” precisely because poetic language allows us to be simply by expressing what we are. The poet, Heidegger adds, “always speaks as though the essent were being expressed and invoked for the first time. Poetry, like the thinking of the philosopher, has always so much world space to spare that in it each thing—a tree, a mountain, a house, the cry of a bird—loses all indifference and commonplaceness.”39
The parity between Newman’s use of the term “void” and Heidegger’s “Nothing” is equally suggestive. Both evoke concepts with which the human presence stands intertwined, but in a state of absolute and mutually exclusive confrontation. As David Farrell Krell explains, “Coming to presence suggests an absence before and after itself, so that withdrawal and departure must always be thought together with Sein as presencing; disclosedness or unconcealment suggest surrounding obscurity . . . darkness and oblivion must be thought together with Aletheia.”40 It was already related above that even if Being comes to presence through Da-sein, Being is never fully manifest in a physical state; it always remains partially obscured: in this way, revealing and occluding cannot be completely differentiated. Accordingly, the “Nothing” is not nothingness in the ordinary, literal sense, but the opposite of prescencing, the absence of Being, a kind of philosophical “dark matter,” as it were. Just as dark matter is invisible and undetectable, but exerts its influence upon visible matter, Heidegger, as Gelven puts it, employs the “Nothing” to suggest what “has existential significance but cannot have any metaphysical referent.”41 And just as self-affirmation is prompted by a confrontation with the void in Newman’s way of thinking, Being is only graspable against the Nothing in Heidegger’s. Truly understood, Brock explains, the problem of nothingness is “inseparably linked with the problem of ‘Being’ . . . we rise to the problem of ‘Being’ only if we have faced the problem of ‘nothingness.’”42 Thus, just as Being comes into presence through Da-sein, but always against the surrounding withdrawal of the Nothing, Newman differentiates his human presences from, but always depicts them against, a surrounding void.
If Newman’s original man railed against this void at his own tragic helplessness, Brock also describes the essence of the Nothing as instilling dread, “making the things in the world slide away out of reach and yet . . . directing and fixing the attention of the powerless man on them. It is not merely the ‘feelings’ of the individual that are aroused . . . the whole of his ‘Dasein,’ i.e. his actual relationship with the things and persons around him . . . and even with himself, is profoundly affected.”43 Although confronting the Nothing is terrifying, that same situation incites greater understanding. Against the “horror and awe” of Nothingness, Brock writes, “the things in the world begin to stand out as what they actually are.”44 Were it not for the Nothing, there would be no self-hood and no freedom.45 What is significant, for Heidegger, is “to experience in Nothing the vastness to that which gives every being the warrant to be. That is Being itself. Without Being, whose unfathomable and unmanifest essence is vouchsafed us by Nothing in essential dread, everything that ‘is’ would remain in Beinglessness.”46
Awakening us from a superficial form of existence, Angst ignites philosophical insight. Human beings, therefore, should permit this experience to intensify their apprehension, not shun the anxiety provoked by the Nothing. Angst may even spark so severe a collapse of the personality that societal expectations will loosen their grip on the individual completely—a strong parallel, arguably, to Newman’s call for an art of “absolute emotion.” These concordances make a strong circumstantial case that Newman came across Brock’s 1949 anthology of Heidegger’s writings. But the connections do not end there. To bolster Heidegger’s position, Brock defended his references to early Greek myths, to “Chaos” and “Genesis.”47 Newman also stressed the importance of chaos in painting his own series on the theme of Genesis, and in expressing the opinion that “the artist like a true creator is delving into chaos. It is precisely what makes him an artist, for the Creator in creating the world began with the same material—for the artist tried to wrest truth from the void.”48 That statement squares with Heidegger’s that the individual for whom existence is an issue “must wrest both appearance and being from the abyss of nonbeing.”49 For Newman, then, chaos is another term for the void, just as, for Heidegger, non-Being is another word for the Nothing. By inducing anxiety, the void and the Nothing are disconcerting, albeit necessary experiences: as modern artists struggle, Newman wrote, they “bring out from the unreal, from the chaos of ecstasy something that evokes a memory of the emotion of an experience of total reality.”50 Analogously, Brock expressed the view that by “exposure to ‘nothingness’ the strangeness of the things that are will be newly and deeply felt. Only when they are impressing one as strange can the genuine astonishment . . . be aroused.”51
Pagan Void (figure 2.3), Day Before One (figure 2.9), or even the background of pivotal paintings as Onement I (figure 2.1) or Be (figure 2.10) can be thus interpreted as examples of this nothingness. Presence is not only contingent on oneness, apprehension, and a sense of place, but also contingent on its inseparability from, as well as its incommensurability with, the void. The Nothing is frightening, not only because it stands as utterly distinct from humanity,52 but also because it represents the state from which humanity emerged and to which it may return, especially if it abrogates its responsibility to contemplate the meaning of Being. In this sense, the Nothing, the void, or chaos should not be construed too literally. Like Being, the Nothing is not a physical being, yet the Nothing has a certain tenuous reality. It is not empty space as much as that before which we are anxious, the absence of meaning; it can also mean, as we shall see in a later section, the emptiness of death. The only being that can face this emptiness and come to terms with its existential implications is Da-sein, a human being who is “present” and who understands what sets the special nature of his or her existence apart from everything else.
On this account, the contrasts between the beams and their backgrounds in Newman’s work may be read, in part, as the artist’s meditation on humanity’s confrontation with chaos, just as Heidegger’s was a meditation on Da-sein’s confrontation with the Nothing. From this perspective, Newman opted for an abstract idiom to convey such ideas because, just as Da-sein connotes human self-awareness rather than a human being in the literal, physical sense, the Nothing connotes an existential idea rather than a literal absence of physical objects. And, by virtue of the very contrast the experience of chaos strikes between humanity and the Nothing, that experience somehow also sparks the very self-awareness of Da-sein who stands against—and whose unitary oneness comes together to face—the emptiness of the void. To emphasize that distinction, Newman clearly differentiated the beam from its surroundings, not simply in terms of line and color, but also in terms of its uninterrupted, vertical directionality. For his part, Heidegger also interpreted the void as a field, “the field of withdrawing concealment.”53 It is also from this concealment, however, that un-concealment comes to light: “the concealment that does not allow anything to emerge but only withdraws, nevertheless prepares the ground of essence of disclosure.”54 The two, in effect, cannot exist without the other. “Man,” Heidegger contends, “stems from the district of uncanny divine place of withdrawing concealment,”55 just as in Newman’s canvases, the beams are always separate from, but positioned in relation to, a background field.
When confronting this void, Da-sein’s harmonic wholeness compensates for its separateness and individuality—precisely the sensation (Onement) Newman sought to evoke in his audience. As such, the human being who comes into presence, and comprehends its position as Da-sein, embodies the opposite of chaos. This opposition takes many forms: humanity versus the rest of nature, self-awareness versus oblivion, and order versus disorder. And to the degree that Newman sees the artist delving into chaos and wresting truth from the void, Heidegger sees Anaximander arguing that “whatever is present . . . which lingers awhile in presence becomes present as it surmounts reckless disorder. . . . [O]rder belongs to that which comes to presence by way of presencing—and that means by way of a surmounting [of disorder].”56 In other words, consonant with Newman’s view that human presence represents a state of harmonious oneness in opposition to the chaos of the void, Heidegger sees presence as coming to order by surmounting disorder.57 This confrontation sharpens the individuality and oneness that Newman and Heidegger intimately associated with presence, qualities that, in turn, directly contradict, say, Freud’s interpretation of the human condition as a continual battle between ego and id. The ego, Freud was fond of saying, was not the master of its own house. 58 For Newman and Heidegger, internal conflicts pale in comparison to the existential conflicts between Da-sein and nature, the self and the void, or self-awareness and lack thereof. No Da-sein facing such existential crises has time for neurotic self-indulgence. When you meet another person for the first time, Newman mused, you do not focus on “details. It’s a total reaction in which the entire personality of a person and your own personality make contact.”59 Accordingly, factoring Rothko into this equation is instructive, a painter with whom, on this very point, Newman parts company. The superimposed layers dividing Rothko’s canvases (figure 5.2), as the artist himself claimed, provided a “pictorial equivalent for man’s new knowledge and consciousness of his more complex inner self.”60 On another occasion, Rothko intimated how riddled with conflict he believed this “complex inner self” actually was: antitheses were neither synthesized nor neutralized in his work, only held in “momentary stasis.”61 Visually, Rothko transcribed these antitheses in terms of the opposition of dark versus light and top versus bottom forms, analogs for the tensions he believed scissored and bedeviled our tormented psyches. His very sensitivity to internal conflict, arguably, led him toward greater appreciation of modern drama at the expense of early Greek tragedy. With time, Rothko mused, “Shakespeare has come closer to me than Aeschylus, who meant so much more to me in my youth. Shakespeare’s tragic concept embodies for me the full range of life.”62
Figure 5.2. Mark Rothko, Green and Tangerine on Red (1956), oil on canvas, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (Kate Rothko-Prizel and Christopher Rothko/Artists Rights Society; photograph: Phillips Collection) © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
If this statement leaves the central difference between Aeschylus and Shakespeare in abeyance, another citation helps clarify the point: the Archaic Greeks, Rothko observed, “used as their models the inner visions which they had of their gods. And in our day, our visions are the fulfillment of our own needs.”63 Again, the statement is not entirely unambiguous, but we take it to mean that Rothko differentiates Greek drama, in which individual heroes wrestle with an unjust fate preordained by the gods, from the more introspective edge of modern drama, where an internally conflicted hero (say, Hamlet) wrestles with himself. If this were indeed Rothko’s point, it would fall perfectly in line with Heidegger’s warning against understanding pain “psychologically” as a form of “lived experience.” Our usual interpretation of suffering, he argues, guarantees that Greek tragedy is still “sealed off to us. Aeschylus-Sophocles on the one side, and Shakespeare on the other, are incomparable worlds.”64 On this issue, Newman’s reading is also Heideggerian. The Greek idea of tragedy, he writes, was “a statement concerning the chaos of individual action. Contrary to the prevailing psychological interpretations—that it was concerned with individual frustration, with the problems of individual failure and success—Greek tragedy constantly revolves around the sense of hopelessness: that no matter how heroically one may act, no matter how innocent or moral that action may seem, it inevitably leads to tragic failure because of our inability to understand or control the social result; that the individual act is a gesture in chaos, so that we are constantly the helpless victims of an insoluble fate.”65
Unlike Rothko, Newman stayed loyal to Aeschylus. After two thousand years, he contends, “we have finally arrived at the tragic position of the Greeks . . . because we have at last ourselves invented a new sense of all-pervading fate.”66 For Newman, the individual’s confrontation with fate trumps the individual’s confrontation with himself, which, in turn, explains Newman’s general hostility toward Freudian psychoanalysis (a hostility, incidentally, that Heidegger also shared67). For both men, presence did not simply mean self-awareness and the surmounting of disorder; it also meant achieving the singular oneness called for in Newman’s Onement.68 Da-sein, Heidegger argued, “is not a structure which is pieced together, but rather a structure which is primordially and constantly whole.”69 Unlike the contrasts in Rothko’s work—between the lighter versus darker, or upper versus lower, strata—those in Newman’s—between the beams and their background——were meant to evoke the tension between a holistic human presence and the void, not that between the different, potentially contradictory, facets of an individual personality. The stripe, in other words, delimits the self from the non-self, that which is Da-sein from that which is not Da-sein, that which has a sense of place from that which has no place, that which is one from that which is chaos. If the meaning of human existence hinges on these differences, these differences cannot be breached, even at the price of isolation and containment. Just as Newman sought to underscore a spectator’s feeling of totality, separateness, and individuality,70 Heidegger sought to investigate “man in his totality,”71 even if that totality segregates Da-sein from it surroundings. “That which lingers awhile in presence,” Heidegger maintains, “comes to presence within bounds.”72 “Where demarcation is lacking,” he interjects elsewhere, “nothing can come to presence as that which it is.”73 In a rather extraordinary interpretive leap, Heidegger sees these bounds as determined by usage. In this light, “to use” means “to let something present come to presence as such . . . to hand something over to its own essence . . . preserving it as something present.”74 Thus understood, usage “enjoining order and so limiting what is present, distributes boundaries. . . . [I]ts essence consists in sending boundaries of the while to whatever lingers awhile in presence.”75 Conceived in this way, “the essence of Being is determined by the unifying One.”76
This visual metaphor coincides with Newman’s signature image: a unified stripe silhouetted against a void and contained within its own boundaries. Elsewhere, Heidegger again stressed the importance of limits. Summarizing the Greeks’ concept of Being as standing presence, he argues that what “comes up and becomes intrinsically stable encounters, freely and spontaneously, the necessity of its limit, peras. . . . Limit and end are that wherewith the essent begins to be.”77 In this particular sense, the boundary does not block, as much as liberate an entity into presence and unconcealment.78 The boundary, Heidegger explains, is not a point “at which something stops” but from which “something begins its presencing.”79 These ideas are consonant with Newman’s visual formulas: the emphatic verticality of the stripes, their chromatic differentiation from the fields that surround them, and the strict, unbreachable boundaries that set them apart. Heidegger’s statements also clarify Newman’s emulations of non-Western art, whose predilection toward abstraction, he believed, reveals “more of man’s nature than a naturalistic representation of man’s physical contours.”80 This framework of ideas—that Da-sein’s essence lies in its unifying oneness, separation from the void, and in its ensuing loneliness—underwrites Newman’s belief that abstraction is more amenable to communicate philosophical ideas, especially if concepts such as presence and the void have no physical referents. Even so, embracing abstraction was still not sufficient. At the core of modern art, Newman believed, was a “desire to destroy beauty”81 and replace it with “self-evident and concrete” images intelligible to “anyone.”82 Superficial beauty and sensual gratification, in other words, should give way to the self-evident concreteness of truth. Truth and beauty, of course, were of equal interest to Heidegger, and, in accord with Newman, the philosopher also deemed beauty inimical to art. Beauty only attracts the longing for “power in man,” reinforcing “the disappearance of the work of art in favour of sheer machination.”83 To counter this nefarious urge, Heidegger reconceptualized beauty in conformity with his own interpretation of truth, by which he meant man’s essence, not an idealized representation of physical appearance. “Beauty,” Heidegger writes, “is truth experienced in a Greek way . . . the unconcealing of what comes to presence by its own power.”84
Befitting Newman’s rejection of Greek figuration, Heidegger regretted how unfaithful the Greeks grew to the principle of unconcealment. Greek philosophy, he lamented, never returned to this ground.85 But he found it, as Newman did, in Greek tragedy. Later Greek philosophy, Heidegger bemoans, occluded the original idea that “standing-in-itself was nothing other than standing-there, standing-in-the-light. Being means appearing. . . . Appearing is the very essence of being.”86 This point has significant implications. With Plato, Heidegger argues, appearance was unhinged from its connection to Being and “degraded.”87 Inasmuch as Newman asserted that modern artists “reject the Grecian form—we do not believe any longer in its beauty—while accepting Greek literature, which by its unequivocal preoccupation with tragedy is still the fountainhead of art,”88 Heidegger insisted that, for the Greeks, thinking and poetizing have “priority” over sculpture and architecture.89 This is not to award “aesthetic” preeminence to one artistic idiom over another, as to identify the idiom closest to Being.90 For Heidegger, the poetry in which the Da-sein of the Greeks was most manifest is tragedy: the key, he maintains, to “Greek poetic philosophy.”91 “The unity and conflict of being and appearance,” he continues, “was represented with supreme purity in Greek tragic poetry.”92
The achievement of Greek Tragedy is to allow Being, not physical beauty, to manifest itself. In fact, both Newman and Heidegger praised Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, the artist for making “each of us” stand like Oedipus, able “by his acts or lack of action, in innocence, [to] kill his father and desecrate his mother,”93 and the philosopher for hurling the situation of a king, the “murderer of his father and desecrator of his mother,” into “unconcealment.”94 Oedipus Rex is not about repressed sexual desire, but reflective of an underlying Greek obsession with the “disclosure of being,”95 a disclosure most evident in pre-Socratic philosophy and Greek tragedy, not in the idealized art of the classical period. When coming across the phrase in Parmenides—“being present . . . is entirely, unique, unifying, united, gathering itself in itself (cohesive, full of presentness)”96—Heidegger claimed these words “stand there like the Greek statues of the early period.”97 Since Heidegger views Being as permanent in its presentness, the most effective visual parallel he produces for this condition are archaic Kouroi (figure 5.3), sculptures whose sense of immobility approximates what he sees as the permanence of Being. The more dynamic, transient poses of later classical statuary (figure 3.1) achieve a more realistic effect, but stymie what he sees as the hallmark of Being: “the pure fullness of the permanent, gathered within it, untouched by unrest and change.”98 This idea justifies Newman’s own decision to reject Greek visual idealization while harboring a keen appreciation for Greek drama, and to reveal “man’s nature” by emulating the “abstract quality” of non-Western art. It also aligns his art with Heidegger’s inquiry into the essence of Da-sein. If understanding non-Western art required rejecting “the skin of ‘beauty’ in which we have grown up, and the cover that permeates the art of the West,” this sentiment squares with Heidegger’s view that the true purpose of art is not “the beautiful in the sense of the pleasing, the pleasant . . . [but] disclosure of the being of the essent.” Only on the strength of its relation to Being, Heidegger writes, will art be awarded “a new content.”99
Figure 5.3. Greek, Kouros, Archaic Period, c. 600 BCE, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
No less than Newman, therefore, Heidegger supplied an alternative interpretation of beauty from that of physical prowess, replacing the athletic, heroic body with “the shining appearance of the spirit which struggles forth into its corporeal measure and form, and grasps itself therein.”100 Though Heidegger’s attitude is consistent with Newman’s, he resolved the problem less by rejecting beauty than by changing its definition, one that walks in lockstep with his own interest in the essence of Da-sein, and, arguably, with Newman’s in the presencing of “man’s nature.” Beauty, Heidegger now insisted, “is the enduring presence of Being. Being is what is true about beings.”101 In Greece, he continues, “the truth of being originally opened itself up as the shining revelation of what comes to presence. There truth was beauty itself.”102 If one follows this rather idiosyncratic reading, beauty is connected neither with formal idealization nor with sensual gratification, but with truth, with what Newman himself associated with the real, the concrete, and the self-evident.103
Returning to the issues raised by humanity’s confrontation with the void, it is important to relate how Newman and Heidegger envisioned that confrontation to be riddled with anxiety—even terror. Though a great admirer of non-Western cultures, Newman closely associated their art with a primal state of terror. In a review, he even claimed that Rufino Tamayo (figure 5.4) had recaptured “the basic terror, the brutality of life. . . . Terror before the mystery of life has been one of the main themes of pre-Columbian art and of the present-day life of the Mexican Indian.”104 Reviewing the “Art of the South Seas” exhibition at MoMA in 1946, Newman reasserted similar beliefs. “[A]ll life,” he declared, “is full of terror. The reason primitive art is so close to the modern mind is that we, living in times of the greatest terror the world has known, are in a position to appreciate the acute sensibility primitive man had for it.”105 For Newman, a primordial terror exists whenever the sources of terror remain undefined (e.g., the incomprehensibility of nature or what the artist described as “abstract forces”).106 As a result, terror is imbued with mystery. In the modern age, the advent of nuclear weaponry has altered this scenario; Hiroshima, he argued, “has robbed us of our hidden terror, as terror can exist only if the forces of tragedy are unknown.” We no longer face “a mystery. . . . The terror has indeed become as real as life. What we have now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation.”107
Figure 5.4. Rufino Tamayo, Animals (1941), Museum of Modern Art, New York.
These statements betray numerous points of intersection with Heidegger. If Newman hoped art would rekindle primal emotions of terror and awe, philosophy, for Heidegger, represented, not “comfort and assurance,” but “the turbulence into which man is spun, so as . . . to comprehend Dasein without delusion.”108 Intriguingly, Heidegger also believed that terror, when deeply felt, reflected the mystery of existence, a state eclipsed in modern times, but in dire need of resurrection. “The oppressiveness of our Dasein,” he writes, “still remains absent today, and the mystery still lacking, then . . . we must first call for someone capable of instilling terror into our Dasein again.”109 Even more to the point, Heidegger, like Newman, also differentiated various forms of terror on the basis of whether their sources are known or unknown. Inasmuch as Newman attributed tragedy to known, and terror to unknown, forces, Heidegger made a near identical distinction. The object “before which we are afraid,” he writes, “the ‘fearsome,’ is always something encountered within the world.” If what threatens us is “something completely unfamiliar, fear becomes horror . . . [and] fear becomes terror.”110
Although Newman calls terror before a knowable entity “tragedy” and Heidegger “fear,” both distinguish this weaker emotion from the inhibiting anxiety sparked by an unknown entity111—and, just as importantly, both designate this emotion by the same word: terror (though, on occasion, the word is translated as “dread”): dread differs qualitatively from fear: “We are always afraid of this or that definite thing, which threatens us in this or that definite way. ‘Fear of’ is generally ‘fear about’ something.” Dread is not “of this or that. . . . The indefiniteness of what we dread is not just lack of definition: it represents the essential impossibility of defining the ‘what.’”112 And just as Newman blamed the threat of atomic annihilation for providing humanity with a specific object of apprehension, robbing us of our primordial sense of terror, Heidegger likewise remarked that the “present world is arranged and organized around the possible threat of a future atomic bomb explosion.”113
Yet nuclear war is avoidable, Heidegger intimates, precisely because it is conceivable; as such, diplomatic efforts may be marshaled to prevent it.114 By contrast, Newman and Heidegger focus on a different, more fundamental form of terror, one that, by virtue of being unknowable, offers no path of escape: our very existential condition of existing in the world. This is not to say that Newman or Heidegger underappreciated the gravity of nuclear Armageddon, but, on the basis of the distinction they drew between knowable versus unknowable objects of dread, both construed any anxiety stemming from a detectable source, however grave, as philosophically and existentially different—different, because our cognizance of preventive measures tempers our uncertainty. If the precautions undertaken to prevent nuclear war inspire sufficient confidence, our anxiety may, if not dissipate altogether, at least be mitigated to some degree. If, on the other hand, the source of our anxiety is unknowable, because it represents a sense of terror about the mystery of our own existence, then no preventive measures may alleviate it. Under these circumstances, terror does not relax its hold; it intensifies—all the more reason, Heidegger and Newman intimate, for us to resolve to endure it. Having no remedy, yet going to the heart of who we are, this form of terror is the more profound. However horrendous a prospect, even nuclear annihilation poses a threat for which, conceivably, a permanent solution may be devised in the future, in which case, we will return to our daily routines without giving the issue another thought. For the primordial terror Newman and Heidegger seek to rekindle, no such prospect exists.
That this kind of terror can be re-awakened implies that “someone” already experienced it in the past and, specifically, in the genuine way Newman and Heidegger envision it. That proverbial “someone,” not surprisingly, was “primitive man.” Orienting the analysis of Da-sein toward “the life of primitive peoples,” Heidegger claimed, “can have a positive methodical significance in that ‘primitive phenomena’ are often less hidden and complicated by extensive self-interpretation. . . . Primitive Da-sein often speaks out of a more primordial absorption in ‘phenomena.’”115 Newman and Heidegger associate the terror they have in mind with original hominids precisely because they knew neither the source of, nor how to alleviate, their terror. Theirs was a genuine response to the uncertainty of existence. Whether our forebears ever felt this kind of “terror” is, of course, debatable, and the artist and philosopher’s armchair anthropology may represent nothing more than the projection of Western preconceptions on non-Western cultures. Even so, Newman’s and Heidegger’s interest in a primordial form of terror functions, not so much on a literal, as on a figurative level. It is not so much that modern individuals should quake before abstract forces (as Newman and Heidegger may have assumed their ancestors did) as be jolted from a state of affective apathy. Better be terrified, they reasoned, than indifferent.
In fact, Newman and Heidegger never conceived of the terror they sought to reignite as a sign of weakness. To their minds, moods do not represent subjective states of mind as much as betray the degree to which existence matters: our senses, arguably, are never as acute as when we are apprehensive. Just as Newman longed for “the fullness that comes from emotion,” Heidegger investigated moods because their sway over our lives demonstrates the extent to which existence is of concern to us. For him, Da-sein even becomes transparent to itself in mood. Again, better to be terrified than indifferent; a condition of indifference, however, unfortunately permeates the modern world. When Newman valued the importance of having a sense of place, and declared that original man, in his primal sense of terror, shouted his consonants in awe at his tragic state, at his own helplessness before the void, he believed that only the poet and the artist are “concerned with the function of original man” and attempt “to arrive at his creative state.” He could, of course, have included the philosopher—and one philosopher in particular. Heidegger, after all, maintained that only “when there is the perilousness of being seized by terror do we find the bliss of astonishment—being torn away in that wakeful manner that is the breadth of all philosophizing.”116 As he describes human existence held out into the Nothing, Heidegger contends, “One of the essential theaters of speechlessness is dread in the sense of the terror into which the abyss of Nothing plunges us.”117
Newman’s void and Heidegger’s Nothing thus represent those abstract forces that inspire dread by virtue of being unknowable, a condition that modern individuals, in their quest for comfort and tranquility, endeavor to forestall. If the vertical beams in Newman’s works were meant to signify—or, more precisely, to arouse a feeling of—human presence, the backgrounds were meant, conversely, to remain indefinite and, arguably, evoke the terror sparked by the unknowability of the void. Yet this experience is not entirely negative. In the grip of terror, worldly concerns lose their significance, and Da-sein is brought back to itself. These sensations underscore the vulnerability of the human condition, but also enable the self to differentiate and assert itself as a free and autonomous entity. These ideas are interdependent; as Heidegger put it, without the revelation imparted by the Nothing, there is “no self-hood and no freedom.”118 The issue of freedom will be the focus of an upcoming section; at this particular point, however, one may well ask the following question: What exactly is the revelation extracted from the Nothing?
Confronting the void forces us to recognize ourselves as Da-sein and as different from anything that is not Da-sein. When human beings realize that they are the only species endowed with self-awareness, this realization engenders feelings of extreme solitude, and a tendency to see anything and everything else as irredeemably other. Our self-awareness is thus a double-edged sword: once we grasp the meaning of our own existence, we find ourselves alone. Unlike animals, which are embedded in their environment, human beings have the unique ability to break through this ring of inhibition, and to stand out in the midst of the Nothing. This uniqueness leads to solitude, and solitude, in turn, to terror. We are anxious over the world and over our selves; we even become answerable to our existence. Describing his own feelings as he worked—and, ostensibly, the feelings he hoped to impart to his audience—Newman wrote, “The terror of that blank area is the whole issue. . . . The most difficult thing [about painting] is sitting in that room by yourself. . . . [I]t’s not like sitting at a place with a desk, where other people are talking to you and the phones are ringing. You are there all alone with that empty space.”119 There is no relief to the isolation humanity feels once it discovers its own uniqueness and finds no satisfactory means of explaining it. The void also provokes anxiety by threatening to reclaim us from our special status as thinking beings. In a sense, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t: self-awareness leads to terror by forcing us to face our solitude, while a lack of self-awareness leads to the terror of losing our sense of self and being reclaimed by the Nothing.
This may suggest that Newman’s and Heidegger’s views of existence are pessimistic through and through. And there is much in their statements to reinforce this suggestion. Newman insisted that his art was nothing if not a confrontation with the “terror of [the] Self,”120 and Heidegger that the “business” of philosophy is “the philosophizing person himself and (his) notorious wretchedness.”121 The mindful awareness or apprehension that Heidegger encourages is not just another activity we might indulge, as a way to enhance our spirituality, say, or to understand our own inner motivations. “No, apprehension is wrested from the habitual press of living” and thrusts humanity “into homelessness, insofar as the home is dominated by the ordinary, customary, and common-place.”122 By the same token, if Newman judged man to be sublime only insofar as he is aware, Heidegger wrote that the “terror that every mystery carries with it . . . gives Dasein its greatness.”123 Because it, and little else, awakens us to our selves, to the nature of our existence, and to the meaning of Being, terror has salutary consequences. “Readiness for dread,” Heidegger exclaims, “is to say ‘Yes!’ to the inwardness of things, to fulfill the highest demand which alone touches man to the quick. Man alone of all beings, when addressed by the voice of Being, experiences the marvel of all marvels: that what-is is. Therefore the being that is called in its very essence to the truth of Being is always attuned in an essential sense. The clear courage for essential dread guarantees that most mysterious of all possibilities: the experience of Being. For hard by essential dread, in the terror of the abyss, there dwells awe (Scheu). Awe clears and enfolds that region of human being within which man endures, as at home, in the enduring.”124 In other words, human beings suffer, yet they must endure. It is their primary responsibility to preserve the reality of Being no matter what they may be forced to undergo: “Freed from all constraint, because born of the abyss of freedom, this sacrifice is the expense of our human being for the preservation of the truth of Being in respect to what-is.”125 Newman was no stranger to this attitude: if Heidegger thought that readiness for dread is to say “yes” to the essence of things and to acknowledge humanity’s responsibility toward existence, Newman also thought, in spite of art being a confrontation with the terror of the self, that “life, as is a true work of art, is, after all, always positive.”126
Notes
1. SWI, 158.
2. SWI, 257–58.
3. SWI, 130.
4. Zollikon Seminars, 122.
5. The Stuff of Thought, 171.
6. FCM, 8.
7. BT, 100.
8. BT, 100.
9. OWL, 93.
10. See BT, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 140.
11. IM, 9.
12. See George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990).
14. Gelven, A Commentary, 27.
16. FCM, 63.
17. FCM, 64.
18. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosett-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 151–52.
19. Barnett Newman, “Picture of a Painter,” Newsweek, March 16, 1959, 58.
20. SWI, 192.
21. See Yve-Alain Bois, “Perceiving Newman,” in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 193ff.
22. Yve-Alain Bois, “Newman’s Laterality,” in Reconsidering Barnett Newman, 33.
23. Random House Webster’s Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1991), 220.
24. Random House Webster’s Dictionary, 104.
25. “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image Signs” (1969), in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 12.
26. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” (1968), in Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art, 135–41.
27. SWI, 158.
28. EGT, 44.
29. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 200.
30. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 200.
31. Barnett Newman, interview with Voice of America in São Paulo, 1965; quoted in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 192.
32. Heidegger quoted in Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 3.
33. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 2.
34. SWI, 188.
35. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 1.
36. SWI, 69.
37. SWI, 248.
38. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 336. No less relevant is the following statement: “it is as much a property of language to sound and ring and vibrate, to hover and tremble, as it is for the spoken words of language to carry a meaning.” OWL, 98.
39. IM, 26.
40. David Farrell Krell, “General Introduction: ‘The Question of Being,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 32.
41. Gelven, A Commentary, 117.
42. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 203.
43. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 213.
44. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 214.
45. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 339–40. This may be usefully compared to a passage in Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be: “Nonbeing threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man’s spiritual self-affirmation in terms of meaninglessness” (41).
46. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 353–54.
47. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 215.
48. SWI, 140.
49. IM, 110.
50. SWI, 163.
51. Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 220.
52. Heidegger wrote, “The [distinction between] One and the Other is the true origin of thought” (Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 62).
53. P, 121.
54. P, 123.
55. P, 124.
56. EGT, 48, 49.
57. Intriguingly, this connection intersects the similarities already mentioned above concerning Newman’s and Heidegger’s views on language. Newman’s scenario of humanity yelling in anger at its own tragic state, for example, echoes Heidegger’s own view that, through the word, the existence of Being not only is asserted but also emerges out of concealment: “Revealing, ‘taking from concealment’, is that happening which occurs in the [logos; word]. In the [logos] the prevailing of beings becomes revealed, becomes manifest” (Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 27). In other words, just as Newman intimates that a feeling of presence and self-awareness manifests itself when early man exclaims words of anger against the void, so does Heidegger construe the logos, the “bringing things to word,” as a manifestation of primordial presence out of concealment. By speaking, in effect, man asserts his existence and brings himself into presence against the Nothing.
58. Sigmund Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1917), trans. J. Strachey (New York: Norton, 1966), 285.
59. SWI, 306.
60. Mark Rothko, “Letter to the Editor,” New York Times, 8 July 1945, sec. 2, 2.
61. William Seitz, Abstract Expressionist Painting in America (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1982), 102.
62. Rothko, interviewed by Peter Selz, in Selz’s Mark Rothko (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961), 12.
63. Rothko cited in Maurice Tuchman (ed.), The New York School: The First Generation (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1965), 142.
64. P, 72.
65. SWI, 168–69.
66. SWI, 169.
67. Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 46.
68. In this respect, the unitariness in Newman’s concept of the self, in opposition to Rothko’s complex and divided self, dovetails with the view Michael Leja proposes when demarcating Newman from other Abstract Expressionists in “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango,” 562ff.
69. BT, 37.
70. SWI, 257–58.
71. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 31.
72. EGT, 53.
73. P, 82.
74. EGT, 53.
75. EGT, 54.
76. EGT, 55.
77. IM, 60.
78. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” “Addendum,” 82.
79. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 152.
80. SWI, 64.
81. SWI, 172.
82. SWI, 173.
83. Mindfulness, 23.
84. EHP, 185.
85. IM, 61.
86. IM, 101.
87. IM, 106.
88. SWI, 168.
89. P, 117, 115.
90. P, 117.
91. IM, 144–45.
92. IM, 106.
93. SWI, 169.
94. IM, 106.
95. IM, 107.
96. IM, 96.
97. IM, 96.
98. IM, 97.
99. IM, 132.
100. EHP, 185.
101. EHP, 156.
102. EHP, 186.
103. Heidegger further posits that, for the Greeks, “supreme understanding” meant “the capacity to let everything reflect back whatever shines within it most purely, and thereby comes to presence. What comes to presence in such shining is . . . the beautiful” (EHP, 185). “[W]hat is to be shown, that is what shines of its own power, is therefore true: beauty. That is why truth needs art, the poetic being of man” (EHP, 186–87). Intriguingly, Newman also made reference to shining and illumination in a number of his titles (e.g., Anna’s Light, Shining Forth, Shimmer Bright, Primordial Light). We shall investigate the philosophical implications of light and illumination in a later section, but, returning to the question of beauty, it is significant to iterate that Heidegger did not simply conflate beauty with truth and presence (two issues of great concern to Newman); he also conflated beauty and the presence of Being with oneness, another connection that strikes a chord with Onement. “Beauty,” Heidegger writes, “is the original unifying One. This One can appear only if it is brought together in its Oneness as the unifying One. According to Plato, the [hen; one] is only visible in the . . . bringing together. But the poets bring together like painters. They let Being (the [idea]) appear in the aspect of the visible. [However, l]ike painters does not mean that these poets depict the real” (EHP, 156). Newman also did not aspire to emulate painters who “depict the real” (i.e., conventional artists who strove to create an illusionistic rendering of three-dimensional space). By seeking to create an abstract image whose simplicity and economy might evoke the enduring presence, the unity and oneness of Being, he was simply visualizing his own pictorial version of a metaphysical “bringing things together.”
104. SWI, 74.
105. SWI, 100.
106. SWI, 100.
107. SWI, 169.
108. FCM, 19.
109. FCM, 172.
110. BT, 131, 133. The distinction also appears in Kierkegaard—see Kurt Reinhardt, “Existence and Being. By Martin Heidegger,” New Scholasticism 25 (1951): 354—and in Paul Tillich’s The Courage To Be, 36.
111. In his essay, “Time Consciousness in Husserl and Heidegger,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 8 (September 1947): 38, Philip Merlan summarizes Heidegger’s view analogously, but makes “dread” a synonym of “anxiety” rather than “fear.” In contradistinction to anxiety, he writes, “Dread and fear have this in common that their object is determinate. But the mood bearing witness of our finiteness is characterized just by the absence of any determinate object. The object of anxiety is nothing—not death itself as an impending event—it is rather the pure opposite of any significance altogether, the impending possibility of the end of significance altogether.” The terms may vary from translator to translator, but the distinction between a weaker emotion stemming from a known object to a stronger one stemming from an unknown one remains.
112. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 335.
113. Zollikon Seminars, 159.
114. Discourse on Thinking, 49.
115. BT, 47.
116. FCM, 365, 366.
117. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 360.
118. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 180.
119. SWI, 282.
120. WI, 187.
121. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 119.
122. IM, 168–69.
123. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 196.
124. “What Is Metaphysics?,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 355.
125. “What Is Metaphysics?,” 358.
126. SWI, 187.