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Chapter 7

Freedom

For Newman, artistic production was not just his major field of activity; it also represented an overarching framework that absorbed philosophy and politics. The meanings of his work, he insisted, revolved around an “assertion of freedom,” a “denial of dogmatic principles,” and a “repudiation of all dogmatic life.”1 As artists, he proclaimed, we “go out into normal society and insist in acting on our own terms.”2 Similarly, Heidegger promoted a pensive mindfulness, not an “inflexible doctrine” employed for “exhortation” or “edification.”3 One’s professed rejection of bourgeois society mirrors the other’s hostility to “publicness,” the dictatorship of the they, or any collective behavior that enforces the “leveling down of all possibilities.”4 Seeking alternatives to the homogeneity of the public realm, both sought to foster a keener form of existence, one in which human autonomy thrives beyond the interference of a pervasively mediocre “bourgeoisie.” Accordingly, freedom, as both men defined it, was as much philosophical as political. For Heidegger, truth and freedom were synonymous: “The essence of truth,” he writes, “is freedom.”5 For Newman, “the artist is free and insists upon freedom.”6

Of course, Newman and Heidegger were not so naïve as to believe in the prospect of unrestricted freedom; one’s references to primordial man’s “helplessness,” the other’s to our inescapable condition of being-in-the-world, attest to their having no illusions on this score. Instead, both made freedom hinge on the issue of choice: following the dictatorial dictates of collective thinking versus facing the burden of existence on an individual basis, or turning away from the reality of Being versus accepting anxiety with resolve and determination. Applying this reading to Newman no less than Heidegger rests on the former’s curious claim that the artist “insists upon freedom.” One says “curious” because, although one can fight for freedom, or insist upon the need for freedom, insisting upon freedom sounds peculiar. A prisoner may wish for freedom and try as he might to escape his captors, but can he really “insist” upon freedom?

The statement is more credible, however, if interpreted along Heideggerian lines. We have already related Heidegger’s view of animals being locked within a ring of inhibition, compelled to act only in accordance with their instincts. Animals, the philosopher maintains, lack “the capacity for resoluteness and steadfastness. . . . In short, they lack freedom, that is: spirit.”7 Human beings have spirit; irrespective of their situation, the choice to be authentic is always available. At liberty, they can follow the path chosen by others, or decide for themselves; unjustly incarcerated, they can collaborate with their captors or adopt a defiant stance. According to Steiner, Heidegger posits that, although it is never the origin of its own Being, Da-sein “must take that being upon itself and bring it to its full realization. This confrontation entails choice.”8 Any affirmation of human existence, Heidegger asserts, is equally predicated upon “freedom of decision.”9 To be free, then, is to choose to be true to one’s essence.10 In this light, Newman’s otherwise curious statement is more intelligible. Insisting upon freedom means that, irrespective of our physical or political situation, we choose to think for ourselves and assert our existence in defiance of any limitations. Subscribing to this definition also suggests that, despite his avowed anarchism, and entrance into the political arena by running for mayor of New York City, Newman’s interpretation of freedom is actually more existentialist than anarchist. As Gerald Runkle argues, existentialist freedom “is not something that, in the manner of the anarchists, we have to struggle for. . . . The existentialist’s freedom can neither be given nor taken away, while the anarchist’s freedom is contingent.”11 Similarly, Marjorie Greene explains that, for Heidegger, freedom “is a risk, a venture, a demand.”12 Unlike political freedom, in other words, existentialist freedom is something one can insist upon. Even if incarcerated or oppressed, we may still insist to choose authenticity over inauthenticity, a choice that defines our existence as Da-seins, and that, unlike other freedoms, cannot be wrung from us.

Another reason to propose this reading is Heidegger and Newman’s preoccupation with destiny, an acceptance of which, for both men, was entirely compatible with an insistence upon freedom. To their minds, freedom represented a resolved acceptance of, not a violent rebellion against, any form of constraint—a seemingly contradictory proposition, but, as already mentioned, Newman was especially attracted to Greek tragedy, especially for its ability to impart a “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 consequently the helpless victims of an insoluble fate.”13

Still, reconciling antithetical notions such as fate and freedom could not have been easy, even for Newman. Again, Heidegger may have provided a way. For him, fate was equally “insoluble”: “the Greek gods,” he writes, “just like men, are powerless before destiny and against it.”14 Human beings, of course, are more vulnerable, especially when fate forces them to confront the inescapability of their own transience. Da-sein’s finitude will be revisited in the section pertaining to time, but, for our present purposes, it is relevant to clarify how accepting our inevitable mortality, for Heidegger, collapses any contradiction between freedom and destiny. Resigned toward death, Heidegger argues, Da-sein casts off the very tranquilizing strategies the they employs to obfuscate the tragedy of existence, and, released from that soothing spell of self-delusion, it accepts its fate as a matter of individual choice. Only under such conditions is it free to face destiny authentically. “Only being free for death,” Heidegger contends, “gives Da-sein its absolute goal. . . . The finitude of existence thus seized upon tears one back out of endless multiplicity of possibilities offering themselves nearest by—those of comfort, shirking and taking things easy—and brings Da-sein to the simplicity of its fate. This is how we designate the primordial occurrence of Da-sein that lies in authentic resoluteness in which it hands itself down to itself, free for death, in a possibility that it has inherited and yet has chosen.”15

Fate and freedom were thus no more antithetical for Heidegger than for Newman. We seldom control the situations in which we are ensnared, our own death most of all, but the way we face these situations, and the kinds of possibilities we extract from them, still lie within our power. These situations, moreover, may be understood authentically or inauthentically. And in accepting finitude authentically, the very condition of freedom is achieved: anticipating death, Da-sein “understands itself in its own higher power, the power of its finite freedom, and takes the powerlessness of being abandoned to itself in that freedom, which always only is in having chosen the choice, and becomes clear about the chance elements in the situation disclosed.”16 Heidegger’s notion of “freedom for death,” then, provides a way to reconcile Newman’s otherwise contradictory fascination with fate and freedom. Intriguingly, Heidegger also attributed a social component to the idea of fate, perhaps accounting for Newman’s insistence that “our inability to understand or control the social result” of our actions leads to tragedy. “[F]ateful Da-sein,” the philosopher writes, “essentially exists as being-in-the world in being with others, its occurrence is an occurrence-with and is determined as destiny. With this term, we designate the occurrence of the community of a people.”17

In many ways, Newman’s and Heidegger’s concepts of fate first diverge and then converge. Newman accepts our inability to control the social results of our actions, and insists that our civilization’s invention of nuclear weapons has imposed a “new sense of all-pervading fate.”18 This situation becomes tragic, not simply because the source of our anxiety is disclosed, but because our ensuing destiny has been artificially manufactured, a manufacture against which it is the artist’s responsibility to resist. Unlike Greek sculptors, who mitigated our tragic condition by creating works of “beauty” (figure 3.1), Newman exhorted artists to “tear the tragedy to shreds.”19 Heidegger would have appreciated such resentment; in fact, he endorsed a late nineteenth-century anti-capitalist romanticism encapsulated in the dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation, according to which culture mandates a rejection of modernity.20 While Zivilisation was deemed artificial and contrived, Kultur reflected an authentic relation to an indigenous tradition. Like Newman, Heidegger related fate to an individual Da-sein’s uneasy connection to a social fabric. But that fate need not necessarily be rejected. If it represented a genuine destiny attending to the concerns of a community rather than a civilization, and if its meanings were properly understood, fate could authentically be taken over (a possibility Da-sein “has inherited and yet chosen”). Within this context, freedom is inordinately relevant, especially as it closely aligns with choice no less than epistemological truth. If its choices are legitimate and veridical, willingly accepted and truly grasped, the actor remains free. Da-sein, according to Heidegger, “is the possibility for being free for its ownmost potentiality of being. Being-possible is transparent for it in various possible ways and degrees.”21 Without access to truth, therefore, Da-sein neither understands the meaning of Being nor has the freedom to fulfill its potential; the very choices it makes, if it “makes” them at all, are simply dictated by others. Without transparency, Da-sein has knowledge neither of itself nor of its world; Da-sein becomes opaque, even to itself. “[T]he opacity of Da-sein,” Heidegger continues, “is not solely and primarily rooted in ‘egocentric’ self-deception, but also in lack of knowledge about the world.”22

Newman also decried the effects of egocentrism: “I cannot work . . . to express myself—or to tell the story of my life—or to find my personality.”23 Instead, he also sought some form of transparency: “Clarity alone,” he insisted, “can lead to freedom.”24 Implicit in such a statement, arguably, is a premise nearly identical to Heidegger’s assertion that truth is freedom: that freedom derives only from an unvarnished appreciation of humanity’s precarious status as Da-sein—again, an existential rather than an anarchist view. Curiously, although collapsing the political and epistemological did not trouble Newman, confounding such disparate domains had significant, sometimes perplexing, consequences. Conflating freedom and truth did not simply subsume the political within, it also awarded dominion to the philosophical (when Heidegger denigrated Alfred Baeumler’s interpretations of Nietzsche, he wrote, “Baeumler does not grasp metaphysically, but interprets politically”25). This recalibration not only places the feasibility of meaningful political reform on precarious ground but also accounts, arguably, for the unrealistic expectations artist and philosopher held, and the rather outlandish claims they made for their respective contributions. What, if not the conflation of politics and philosophy, led Heidegger to believe in his ability to provide the intellectual backbone for the Nazi state?26 He even petitioned for a leave of absence in 1943, arguing to his dean that the request arose, not “from a personal interest in the promotion of my own work,” but from a “knowledge of the limits of German philosophical thinking with regard to the future of the West.” It seems, Tom Rockmore contends, as though Heidegger literally believed the future of the West depended “on the proper understanding of metaphysics, supposedly presented in his own thought.”27 Did not a similar conflation of politics and philosophy likewise prompt Newman, when challenged by Harold Rosenberg to explain the meaning of his paintings, to answer, dismayingly, that a correct interpretation would bring an end to “all state capitalism and totalitarianism”?28 (On this point, it might be worth mentioning, if only parenthetically, that Egon Vietta, who lectured on Heidegger at the Club, penned the following aphorism: “If Heidegger’s thinking were understood, then the technological age in which we live would come to an end.”29 Newman may thus have styled his own answer to Rosenberg’s query on Vietta’s account.)

Of course, such claims reflect far more negatively on Heidegger than on Newman, and strike a present-day observer as particularly egregious in view of the philosopher’s quips about “egocentric self-deception” and a “lack of knowledge about the world.”30 Still, their political naiveté (a word perhaps too mild to apply to Heidegger) may be directly attributed to their fusion of philosophy and politics—a fusion, in turn, that led them to endorse an unconventional definition of freedom. That definition may yet be salvaged, albeit provisionally, if a later Heideggerian idea were factored into the equation—one postdating the failure of his rectorate, and following his alleged disillusionment with politics: namely, the idea of “letting things be.” This attitude weds truth to freedom by making the freedom of any entity contingent upon an understanding of, and fundamental respect for, its existence: “Freedom reveals itself,” Heidegger writes, “as the ‘letting-be’ of what-is.”31 A true understanding of Da-sein now means that Da-sein should not so much fulfill its destiny as simply be allowed to “be,” and, in being allowed to be, Da-sein may achieve the condition of freedom. This conclusion may strike many as anti-climactic, if not utterly disappointing, but one should remember that, for Heidegger, Da-sein cannot be defined beyond its own potential; Da-sein is nothing if not “a being-possible entrusted to itself.”32 Da-sein is in-the-world, entangled in the they, and still the possibility of meeting its potential is there, dormant perhaps, yet undeniably there. Thus, if Da-sein understands itself, it will do so, not as a predetermined entity, but as a being for which something more is always possible. Only by grasping possibility as its essence, and by being allowed to fulfill it, will Da-sein, in Heideggerian parlance, be free.

The correlation between freedom and truth is now easier to comprehend: the freedom to “be” is predicated on acknowledging the essence of our existence as possibility and being empowered to realize it. And though “letting something be” may connote indifference or negelct, Heidegger’s meaning is radically different. By letting an entity “be,” he means discovering its truth by contributing to, even participating in, its unveiling. It was already related that, by investigating the Greek word for truth, Heidegger claimed that its literal meaning is “revealment” and “unconcealment.” It therefore stands to reason that Heidegger would also endorse an unconventional definition of freedom. For him, freedom is not the ability to act without constraints; freedom is the bringing about of “revealment” and “unconcealment.” Freedom, he writes, “seen from the point of view of the nature of truth now shows itself as the ‘exposition’ into the revealed nature of what-is.”33 Freedom is “a participation in the revealment of what-is-as-such.”34

Since it is easier to see how error leads away from freedom than how truth leads to it, perhaps reversing the relationship might also prove beneficial. If letting things be allows something to manifest itself in a state of revelation, the opposite means turning away from reality, and losing ourselves in everyday concerns. In which case, we do not let things “be”; we contribute to their occlusion, even to the occlusion of our own Being. Heidegger called this form of existence “erring.” Granted, Newman did not delve into these issues at any great length, but when he proclaimed that clarity alone leads to freedom,35 he forged, like Heidegger, an indissoluble link between freedom and truth. Unlike representational art, which dissimulates our existential predicament under a veneer of beauty, his paintings were professed to reveal the truth of our existence, empowering us to accept it freely. And when he titled one of his works L’Errance (figure 7.1)—which refers, of course, to the act of straying, but also evokes the idea of mistaking (as in the expression “to go astray”)—he may, given his metaphorical bent, also be employing physical erring to reference our losing sight of the truth and mystery of existence. Newman even decried Surrealism’s interest in the human psyche as “a mundane expression” of the “human world.” Instead of the “mystery of his own personality,” Newman continued, the new painter should contemplate “the world-mystery . . . the mystery of life and death.”36 Rejecting the mundane in favor of the mysterious, Newman, whether consciously or not, was aligning his views with Heidegger’s. As the philosopher himself put it, the “insistent turning towards the practicable and accessible and this ex-sistent turning away from the mystery go together . . . Man’s drifting from the mystery to the practicable and from one practicability to the next, always missing the mystery is erring.”37

Erring thus refers to the mundane pragmatism of inauthentic Being, a form of untruth and unfreedom. L’Errance, it should be noted, is composed in an emphatically asymmetrical manner, with a red beam at the extreme left and another at the right, in dark blue, flush with the framing edge. We have already hypothesized that paintings such as Not There-Here (figure 4.2) and Right Here (figure 5.1), by virtue of being radically asymmetrical, denote a de-centered subject, oblivious to the truth and meaning of existence. In fact, William Richardson describes the condition of errance in a way that is not so far from the sensations induced by Newman’s painting: Da-sein “wanders from one being to another in a state of confusion, driven about hither and thither, looking for a satisfaction that no being can give, searching for a repose that no being, torn from the roots of ultimate meaning in mystery, can offer.”38 With an empty chasm at its center, L’Errance (which has also been called The Wandering) induces a similarly dizzying and disconcerting effect, forcing us to direct our attention first to one beam, then to the other, without allowing our gaze to rest comfortably on any single spot. The disparity in hue, dark blue versus intense red, also accentuates the difference, even incommensurability, of the disparate beams. The painting appears both literally and figuratively bipolar: visualizing two existential alternatives about which a self, uncertain and confused, cannot decide. If such a reading is persuasive, it might explain why, in contradistinction, Be I (figure 2.10) and Onement I (figure 2.1) are perfectly symmetrical, denoting a centered, authentic human presence aware of itself and of its place in the world. In this way, Newman would be availing himself of the symmetrical versus asymmetrical compositional dyad to convey something analogous to Heidegger’s distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity: between a Da-sein, grounded and secure, resolved and confident, and another who drifts and errs aimlessly, unable to choose between two alternatives. The latter is a most undesirable situation. Losing sight of the truth of Being, Da-sein can understand neither itself nor fulfill the very potential for which it is responsible; in this condition, Da-sein is inauthentic and unfree.

To compensate for the inauthenticity of our being-in-the-world, Heidegger postulates that “care,” “concern,” or “solicitude” may serve as well as existential self-awareness.39 By “care,” Heidegger means genuine involvement and concern, not the everyday chores and burdens to which we attend by rote—sincere interest, not complacency, involvement, not indifference. Newman was no stranger to this mindset: “For me, painting involves an immediate exercise of total commitment.”40 Creating works of art, he insisted, is “an attempt to put down what you really believe and what you really are concerned with or what really moves you and interests you.”41 This form of commitment, coupled with Newman’s stress on self-awareness, provides a compelling analog to Heidegger’s concept of authentic Being. If, according to Safranski, to ponder something means “to return its dignity to it,”42 then pondering the mysteries of existence, as Newman professes, means reclaiming authenticity and dignity for existence. Authenticity, therefore, is achievable by resolution, by attentiveness to the mystery, but also by genuine concern for others. Accordingly, Heidegger’s disparagement of collectivity does not absolve the individual from social responsibility,43 as Newman’s diatribes against the herd did not preclude him from expressing his own concern for giving spectators the feeling of their own presence and place, and for eliciting “sympathetic participation on the part of the beholder in the artist’s vision.”44

At this point, one may be in a better position to appreciate Newman’s and Heidegger’s claim for the inordinate philosophical (and political?) import of extreme states of Being. For both, alienation, anxiety, and terror counteract the conformity typical of the mob mind or dispel the soothing effects with which the they beguiles Da-sein into inauthentic existence. In the process, Newman and Heidegger were diagnosing problems they saw as endemic, specifically, to modern Western culture. As far as Newman was concerned, preindustrial cultures had nothing comparable to the “mob mind.” Whether this view is at all accurate, or a romantic projection on Newman’s part, is of less concern to this study than his belief that “primitive man,” living in a state of terror before abstract forces, was freer and more authentic than modern man, especially as the latter is condemned to a spiritually barren, conformist existence. Recalling his early writings on non-Western art, Newman wrote, “I was talking about man’s birthright, his urge to be exalted, which even primitive man understood and which modern man seems to have forgotten,”45 a statement perfectly consistent with Heidegger’s view that modern man, living a life of mundane mediocrity, and ignoring the all-important question of Being, lives unfree and in utter forgetfulness, contrary to his own essence.

Whether such a politico-philosophical hybrid provides a satisfactory account of freedom remains, of course, an open question; Guenther Stern, for one, finds Heidegger’s position ultimately disappointing by making humanity appear freer “than it actually is.”46 An excellent point, to be sure, but even if one rejects the conflation of politics and philosophy, or of truth and freedom, those connections clarify why Newman and Heidegger ascribed freedom, not to unfettered action, but to loyalty to the self. “Resoluteness constitutes the loyalty of existence to its own self,” Heidegger writes, “loyalty is at the same time a possible reverence for the sole authority that a free existence can have.”47 From this perspective, authenticity and freedom are ours only after accepting the “thrownness” of our own Da-sein in a way that is “free from illusion.”48 Seeking any kind of emotional solace is tantamount to losing our freedom. Freedom, for Heidegger, is only found “where there is a burden to be shouldered.”49 To be free, Da-sein must choose to be brought face to face with its nakedness, its thrownness, and its anxiety.

As philosophy overtakes politics, it is incumbent upon Da-sein to free itself, an endeavor achievable by none other than Da-sein: freedom, Heidegger insists, consists only in Da-sein’s “freeing itself,” a self-liberation contingent on Da-sein’s self-disclosure.50 Again, freedom is nothing if not truth. If Newman was thinking along such lines (and his comment that “clarity alone can lead to freedom” strengthens this reading), then his claims for a proper understanding of his works precipitating the end of all capitalism and state totalitarianism seem at least a little less nonsensical. By feeling their own presence and alienation, members of his audience might extricate themselves from the tranquilizing delusions perpetuated by a pedestrian culture. By witnessing the large expanses of space in Newman’s canvases, they might grasp their potential: that their condition is one of freedom, openness, and possibility.51 “I have always been aware of space as a space-dome,” Newman recalled, “I would prefer going to Churchill, Canada, to walk the tundra than to go to Paris. For me space is where I can feel all four horizons, not just the horizon in front of me and in back of me.”52 Any sense of space induced by his paintings, he added, should make the spectator feel “full and alive in a spatial dome of 180 degrees going in all four directions.”53 Instructively, Heidegger also expressed freedom in terms of openness: to disclose, “i.e., to let appear in the open, can only be accomplished by what gives in advance this open and thus is in itself self-opening and thereby is essentially open, or as we may also say, is of itself already ‘free.’ The still concealed essence of the open as the primordial self-opening is ‘freedom.’”54 Forced to work within the confines of a physical canvas, Newman, then, sought to transcribe Heidegger’s openness, metaphorically, into the “open space” of his own works.

Though both conceived of freedom in primarily philosophical terms, this does not mean that Newman and Heidegger ignored political questions (as already mentioned, Newman ran for the mayoralty of New York and Heidegger lent his support to National Socialism). At issue, then, are the more specific political implications of their philosophy. If understanding an entity, after all, is predicated upon recognizing its truth, that same recognition, for Heidegger, meant that this same entity should be allowed to be what it is. Letting things “be” denotes, in theory, an attitude incompatible with all forms of control and manipulation—what Heidegger derogatorily called “machination” or “intelligence.” Any form of exploitation for utilitarian and ideological purposes engenders a loss of spirituality and the closing of Being. Intelligence, he writes, “relates to the regulation and domination of material conditions of production (as in Marxism) or in general to the intelligent ordering and explanation of everything that is present and already posited at any time (as in positivism), or whether it is applied to the organization and regulation of a nation’s vital resources and race.”55 No sooner is spirit misinterpreted into intelligence than spirit is degraded “into a tool,” and “the energies of the spiritual process, poetry and art, statesmanship and religion, become subject to conscious cultivation and planning.”56

Newman likewise held Marxism in contempt for treating the artist no differently than the worker.57 “The worker creates for use,” he asserted, “but the artist definitely does not. It is only the slave psychology of masses in chains, given expression in the Marxian parties, that insists that art must be useful. The worker recognizes the true creative artist as his enemy, because the artist is free and insists upon freedom.”58 Heidegger also decried “the transformation of men into a mass, the hatred and suspicion of everything free and creative.”59 Some thirteen years after Newman’s statement, Heidegger intriguingly insisted that his philosophy had no utilitarian purpose (although this text postdates his failure to put that philosophy into practice during his rectorate at Freiburg60). Its goal was now to discover a truth that, once exposed, precluded interference and manipulation. Any thinking of Being, the philosopher contends, “is neither theoretical nor practical. . . . Such thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is. . . . Its relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer. For it lets Being—be.”61 Speaking of his own work, Newman, as cited at the outset, similarly iterated “its assertion of freedom, its denial of dogmatic principles, its repudiation of all dogmatic life.”62 Analogously, Heidegger argued that “no arbitrary idea of being, no matter how ‘self-evident’ it is, may be brought to bear on [the question] of this being in a dogmatically constructed way; no ‘categories’ prescribed . . . may be forced upon Da-sein.”63

The laconic use of the word “be” in several of Newman’s titles also echoes the Heideggerian idea of simply letting things “be.” Revealingly, Richard Shiff, an astute reader of Newman’s work, also titled, independently and without any reference to the Heideggerian concept, one of the sections of his essay in the Philadelphia Museum catalog as “Let it Be.”64 Yet it bears repeating that letting “things be” should not be confused with indifference,65 only associated with the solicitude necessary to allow things to manifest themselves outside the oppressive power of authoritarian forces. The clear distinction Heidegger drew between authentic versus inauthentic existence, or Newman between sublime awareness versus mob mentality, makes it clear that, as they saw it, individual autonomy and group collectivity are in continual tension. Just as Newman declared that man “is one, he is single, he is alone; and yet he belongs, he is part of another. The conflict is the greatest of our tragedies,” Heidegger believed that the basic conflict to be resolved is whether man must be “the subject as an I let loose with limitation as to his own choice and arbitrariness, or as the We of society, whether as individual or community or a mere member of a group.”66

In this conflict, there is no ambiguity as to where Newman falls. It was already proposed that Newman’s use of multiple beams might provide an analogy to Heidegger’s concepts of Being-with: Mit-sein or Mit-Da-sein, the inescapable condition of Da-sein being-in-the-world with other Da-seins even if other Da-seins are not present. But it may be significant to note that whenever Newman represents numerous beams within a single image, it is exceedingly rare to find more than two displaying the same color. It is, of course, impossible to determine what this observation might signify. But in view of Newman’s radical individualism, we conjecture that, when two beams evidence the same color, this connection reinforces the impression that a certain solidarity exists among, or binds, two discrete human presences, as in Concord (figure 6.1). Conversely, when Newman entwined a human presence among a larger cluster of human presences, as in Vir Heroicus Sublimis (figure 6.7), he refrained from ascribing a common color to all individual beams, lest this undermine their autonomy and bespeak a common destiny. Perhaps so subtle a formal decision might convey Newman’s desire to prevent more than two Da-seins from sharing the same fate, or endorsing an identical, collective mindset. Though Heidegger’s support of National Socialism makes his case more problematic, he wrote sufficient passages, even in Being and Time, whose implications Newman could have taken as consistent with his own views. Heidegger’s position is that Da-sein is authentic when it has the courage to base itself on itself. Heidegger, Safranski writes, “deploys his ethics of authenticity against public ethics.” 67 If it manages to extricate itself and return to itself, the self achieves an awareness of mortality, of time, and of its own potentiality for Being: as such, it may be spontaneous, creative, authentic, and free. All these qualities lead to an intensification of Da-sein, an intensification occurring exclusively on an individual basis. If Newman conceived his paintings “in utmost solitude,” and to “be examined by critics in relation to the true nature and degree of how much solitude,”68 Heidegger also expressed the view that his kind of philosophy “depends on an enigmatic solitude, taking the word ‘solitude’ in a high, unsentimental sense.”69

Thus, in allowing philosophy to trump politics, neither Newman nor Heidegger relinquished their right to impugn totalitarian governments on both political and philosophical grounds. The political argument would revolve around the individual’s subordination and loss of autonomy, the philosophical around the trampling of Being whenever collective groups thwart individuals from fulfilling their potential. One would think that, having formulated such ideas, Heidegger would have been inoculated against any involvement with National Socialism; yet, on the whole, these concepts are entirely consonant with Newman’s anarchist politics. When Heidegger declared, for instance, that creators and thinkers become “apolis, without city and place, lonely, strange, and alien, without issue amid the essent as a whole, at the same time without statute and limit, without structure and order, because they themselves as creators must first create all this,”70 this sentiment is hardly incompatible with anarchism, a concept extrapolated from the Greek word anarkhia, from the term anarkhos, meaning “without a ruler.” From being without a city, it is but a short step to being without a ruler.

For his part, Newman identified the state as the artist’s “traditional enemy.”71 In his foreword to Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs, he declared anarchism as “the only criticism of society which is not a technique for the seizure and transfer of power by one group against another. . . . What is particular about anarchism is not its criticism of society but the creative life it offers that makes all programmatic doctrine impossible.”72 These sentiments are hardly incompatible with Heidegger’s doctrine of letting things be. Intriguingly, Newman also describes Kropotkin in terms not dissimilar from Heidegger’s description of the tyrannical oppression of the they: he was a person “intoxicated with the love of personal freedom . . . he stood against all forms of domination.”73 Kropotkin, Newman continues, was “scrupulous to the point of fanaticism in his defense of the untrammeled person. He was careful to respect the identity of others as he was conscious of his own.”74

It should be admitted, of course, that respecting individual autonomy is hardly exclusive to Newman or Heidegger, and placing Kropotkin’s anarchism on the same plane as ideas from a philosopher who, for however long, sympathized with Nazi ideology may seem perverse at best. (In fact, Newman’s own endorsement of Kropotkin was itself not above contradiction: as Ann Alexander Schoenfeld observed, “the anarchist does not aspire to a governmental position,”75 an obvious reference to Newman’s candidacy for the mayoralty of New York.) But celebrating personal autonomy is not the only element binding Newman and Heidegger. Even more relevant is the increased existential intensity both associate with escaping the grip of collectivist thinking. “The more inward man’s feeling of freedom,” Heidegger contends, “the more he feels himself to be existent.”76 Similarly, according to Newman, what comes through Kropotkin’s “engagement” in the events that changed his life “is a heightened sense of ‘being.’”77 This statement adds weight to some of the connections between Newman and Heidegger postulated here: if achieving a heightened state of Being is a crucial aspect of Heideggerian philosophy, Newman uses these very terms to laud Kropotkin’s work. Even if many at the time voiced a concern for freedom and individuality, the idiosyncratic connections both men drew between freedom and truth, collectivity and the loss of self, or individual authenticity and a heightened state of Being denote a narrower compass of ideas. By praising the way Kropotkin’s “engagement” leads to a heightened state of Being, Newman also echoes Heidegger’s stress on the decisive role of engagement: philosophy “is not a matter of method, but one of engagement and of the possibility of engagement pertaining to a philosophical existence.”78 Intriguingly, when expounding on the authenticity of Da-sein, Safranski describes Heidegger’s ideas in a way that is remarkably similar to Newman’s exultations of Kropotkin: authenticity “is about the intensification of the sense of Dasein. Authenticity is intensity.”79 Heidegger, Safranski continues, made his philosophy into an attempt to awaken “existential engagement” in his readers and students, to invoke “the Dasein in Man” and conjure “moments of true sensation.”80

Not only did Newman and Heidegger define freedom philosophically rather than politically, they also employed the openness of space to evoke it, an attitude Safranski describes this way: “Freedom in this sense means having distance, open space. This distance, providing an open space, is also called ‘openedness’ by Heidegger. Only in this openedness is there a play of concealment and unconcealment. If this openedness did not exist, man could not distinguish himself from what surrounds him. He could not even distinguish himself from himself, and thus would not even know that he is there.”81 This attitude strikes a compelling parallel with Newman’s claim that “anyone standing in front of my paintings must feel the vertical domelike vaults encompass him to awaken an awareness of his being alive in the sensation of complete space.”82 Newman, in effect, devised his own paintings along these lines: the beam was meant to trigger the intellectual idea of self-awareness extrapolated from the physical sensations humans feel when bound to a specific place. Self-awareness, in turn, might trigger sensations of alienation and anxiety, but those feelings would ostensibly be compensated by the expansive space of his canvases. This space, surrounding the beam as it does in all directions, furnished a way of translating the euphoric sensation of freedom and possibility sparked whenever the oppressive mentality of the collective mind is overcome. As the artist himself put it, “The freedom of space, the emotion of human scale, the sanctity of place are what is moving.”83 And just as Newman lauded the “freedom of space,” the “emotion of human scale,” and “the sanctity of place,” so did Heidegger employ space as a metaphor for freedom and potential, as an analog for Da-sein’s recognition of its own potentiality-for-Being. The experience of Being is, as Safranski summarizes it, that of Being in the midst of an “open place.”84

Notes

1. SWI, 251.

2. SWI, 241.

3. Mindfulness, 17.

4. BT, 119.

5. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 303.

6. SWI, 8.

7. Martin Heidegger, “The Call to Labor Service,” in Wolin (ed.), The Heidegger Controversy, 54.

8. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 108.

9. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 274.

10. See Faye, Heidegger: L’Introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, 134.

11. Gerald Runkle, Anarchism Old and New (New York: Delacorte Press, 1972), 307. See Ann Alexander Schoenfeld, An Art of No Dogma: Philosophical Anarchist Protest and Affirmation in Barnett Newman’s Writings and Art.

12. Marjorie Greene, Martin Heidegger (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1957), 47.

13. SWI, 168–69.

14. P, 110.

15. BT, 351.

16. BT, 351–52.

17. BT, 352.

18. SWI, 169.

19. SWI, 169.

20. Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992), 32.

21. SWI, 135.

22. SWI, 137.

23. SWI, 250.

24. SWI, 123.

25. Heidegger, cited in Bambach, 287.

26. See Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 54ff.

27. Rockmore, 92.

28. SWI, 251.

29. Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929–1976, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 102.

30. BT, 137.

31. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 305.

32. BT, 135.

33. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 307.

34. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 307. “The ex-istence of historical man begins at that moment,” he continues, “when the first thinker to ask himself about the revealed nature of what-is, poses the question: What is what-is?” (“On the Essence of Truth,” 308).

35. SWI, 123.

36. SWI, 140.

37. “On the Essence of Truth,” in Brock, Martin Heidegger: Existence and Being, 316–17.

38. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought, 224.

39. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 99.

40. SWI, 248.

41. SWI, 254.

42. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 354.

43. Steiner, Martin Heidegger, 108–9

44. SWI, 142.

45. SWI, 287.

46. Guenther Stern (Anders), “On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” 359. After explaining how Heidegger’s theory of freedom is closely connected to his theory of freedom, Stern incisively states, “The fact that the major portion of history is history of power, thus history of the un-free, history imposed upon people, is totally suppressed” (360).

47. BT, 357.

48. BT, 357.

49. FCM, 182.

50. FCM, 149.

51. A similar idea was proposed, without reference to Heideggerian philosophy, by Ann Alexander Schoenfeld in An Art of No Dogma: Philosophical Anarchist Protest and Affirmation in Barnett Newman’s Writings and Art, 212.

52. SWI, 249.

53. SWI, 250.

54. P, 143; Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 304: “In the experience of Being, man discovers himself and his play space. He is not captured or trapped in the existent. . . . Amid the things he has free ‘play,’ just as a wheel must have ‘play’ at its hub in order to move.”

55. IM, 47.

56. IM, 48.

57. See Mollie McNickle, The Mind and Art of Barnett Newman, 18.

58. SWI, 8.

59. IM, 38. On page 63, moreover, Heidegger added, “When the creators vanish from the nation, when they are barely tolerated as an irrelevant curiosity, an ornament, as eccentrics having nothing to do with real life; when authentic conflict ceases, converted into mere polemics, into the machinations and intrigues of man within the realm of the given, then the decline has set in.”

60. See Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 54ff.

61. “Letter on Humanism,” in Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, 236.

62. SWI, 251.

63. BT, 14–15.

64. Richard Shiff, “Whiteout: The Not-Influence Newman Effect,” in Temkin, Barnett Newman, 84ff.

65. “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 31: “What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is? Or does this turn out to be the most difficult of tasks, particularly if such an intention—to let a being be as it is—represents the opposite of the indifference that simply turns its back upon the being itself in favor of an unexamined concept of being? We ought to turn toward the being, think about it in regard to its being, but by means of this thinking at the same time let it rest upon itself in its very own being.”

66. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 297.

67. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 165.

68. SWI, 261.

69. What Is Called Thinking?, 169.

70. IM, 152–53.

71. See Thomas Hess, Barnett Newman (1969), 17.

72. SWI, 45.

73. SWI, 45.

74. SWI, 45. For an extensive analysis of Newman’s relationship with Kropotkin, see Ann Alexander Schoenfeld, An Art of No Dogma.

75. Schoenfeld, An Art of No Dogma, 6.

76. Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 70.

77. SWI, 48–49.

78. FCM, 154.

79. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 170.

80. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 177.

81. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 218, 219.

82. SWI, 250.

83. SWI, 186.

84. Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, 304