Atmospheric Architectures

Ontology and Aesthetics of Thingness

Subjectivism in aesthetics

Nature in some way has always been a topic in modern aesthetics and art. As aesthetic theory, however, aesthetics has invariably been a theory of the subject, never one of nature. Nature was only of interest insofar as it was the subject of art; at most, insofar as an aesthetic attitude to nature was also conceivable. That is, one could behold real nature with the eyes of the visual artist, as it were, with a ‘framing eye’, as Hermann Schmitz puts it (1977: 621 u. § 218e, ß). The reason for this situation is to be found in the subjectivism of aesthetics itself.

To be sure, aesthetics is subjectivist only in general, not in each single instance. Accordingly, there is a chunk of a theory of nature contained in the aesthetics of Hegel, for whom, after all, aesthetics is part of the objective spirit. The stages of the organic are, as they approach the beautiful, steps in which the idea comes into itself. Kant’s aesthetic, by comparison, is definitely subjectivistic through and through insofar as the judgement of the beautiful and sublime is founded on an inner condition. However, this condition is interpreted as the cognisance of a kind of pre-stabilized harmony between inner and outer, between the capacities of the mind, on the one hand, and the existence of things and their configuration, on the other. What Kant’s theory does not admit is that aesthetic experience not only includes the self-experience of the subject but also a certain experience of nature. Quite effortlessly, poetry allows nature to speak and painting touches us in its representations of nature through colours, forms, and atmospheres. The characters that appear in nature are nevertheless understood as mere metaphors in theory, as anthropomorphisms, or as projections. Thus, Novalis writes in The Novices of Sais: ‘Does the cliff not become a unique Thou, whenever I speak to it?’ (2005: 89). When one speaks to it; the initiative, then, lies on the side of the lyrical subject. Consequently, the individual is consistently seen as ‘the constitutive factor of landscape’ in the theory of landscape painting (Eberle, 1980), according to which sprawling nature is first organized into landscape by a ‘scenic eye’, a reflecting subject. The aesthetic attitude towards nature is regarded as a modern achievement, only made possible through the release of the subject from a direct confrontation with nature and through the opposition of farm and country or city and country. This analysis is not in question here, nor is the proposition that a particular attitude is needed to recognize certain characters of nature as such, and then to be able to talk of the beauty and sublimity of nature. However, this does not mean that these characters are created by the ‘aesthetic attitude’ or somehow projected into nature. They can indeed belong to nature itself and also always be experienced, even if not explicitly and in a laborious struggle with nature – perhaps more in the background and most effectively as a mood component. Neither is it in question that everything experienced by the subject is co-determined by it. However, that something is experienced is not in the subject’s control. Rather, just as one has to assume a sensibility on the side of the subject, so one has to assume characters on the side of nature that address the subject. Further, the form-giving moment that already takes effect in each instance of the perception of nature is nothing like an arbitrary design process. It is much more like a co-design, a co-operation, or an interplay (of the subject’s intention) with the object’s emanations. Finally, we have to add today that the subject as a bodily being is endowed with senses that must correspond to the realms or dimensions of nature. Since humans as living beings are a product of evolution in nature, the old saying of the likeness between eye and sun – ‘If the eye were not sunny, how could we perceive light?’ (von Goethe, 1840: xxxix) – makes sense to us again today. Human sense organs, like all sense organs, must be understood as successful adaptations to the facts of nature; they are, as it were, the organism’s responses to nature’s address. This relationship – namely, of the perceptible preceding perception – is impressively demonstrated in the formation of analogous organs in different evolutionary strands. The eye was in a sense invented several times over during the course of evolution.

Whether one wants to argue using the phenomenology of perception or naturalistically using the theory of evolution, in either case an orientation towards perceptibility is shown to be a basic character of nature. A showing itself on the side of nature, or a stepping-outside-of-themselves of natural things, corresponds with receptivity on the side of the subject.

Terminological differentiations

To proceed with the exploration of this stepping-outside-of-themselves of things, it is first necessary to delimit the thematic area. A thing, in our context, is a physical, sensually given being. Both the German expression Ding (thing) and the Latin term res are of course often also used in a more general sense. Thus, Ding frequently designates indexically something that one cannot or does not want to name at that moment, or more generally the object of discussion or contemplation. When we concentrate on things as sensually given, physical beings, we do include products of the visual arts and nature, but we exclude entities like wind or night, or media like air or water. It goes without saying that this exclusion can only be a temporary measure: an aesthetics of nature, particularly, cannot apply to things only. However, aesthetics as a theory of visual arts cannot be limited to corporeally sensual givens either. It must be able to embrace laser sculptures, computer graphics, and other immaterial objects. In either case, a focus on the thing can therefore be only provisional; it is justified by the fact that classical ontology itself has taken shape principally as an ontology of the thing.

The prevalence of the thing in ontology

That ontology, at various points in the history of philosophy, has developed using the example of the thing is particularly significant from the perspective of aesthetics. For other entities – qualities, characters, physiognomic traits, atmospheres – were in the course of this development relegated to the realm of minority, of the ephemeral, indeterminate, merely subjective. Though it would be wrong to say that Plato defined being as a thing (quite the opposite!), his examples (bed, bridle) could indeed mislead one into thinking that the idea makes a thing a being. Aristotle, of course, then followed him in that direction as the original meaning of eidos and idea already suggests. Eidos and idea mean appearance – but appearance of what? Of a thing, presumably. It would already be unusual to use eidos to mean the appearance of the sea, and the appearance of a person, in the sense of his or her physiognomy, would not usually be called eidos either. If eidos had been associated with physiognomy or character traits, ontology would have taken an entirely different direction already with Plato. Eidos is, after all, not an index or a symptom but the appearing matter itself. The Platonic theory of ideas certainly contains remnants of archaic Greek thought, according to which the Gods are Being proper: one is just through the Just, beautiful through participation in Beauty. Plato’s concrete analyses, however, are already oriented towards the thing as individual being.

With Aristotle, the question of on he on Being as such) then turns consistently into the question of the constitution of the thing. Being proper is, according to Aristotle, tode ti this particular something). Of course, one could take tode ti to mean something like the air and, for Aristotle, hapla somata simple bodies) like fire, water, earth, and air are definitely not bodies in our sense. Nevertheless, it is difficult to take ti in tode ti to mean something like air since ti means something particular, while air as a medium is ahoriston (αόζιστον, unlimited). Simple bodies are, consequently, only the lowest stage of being. Degrees of being increase in different stages, according to the measure of internal unity – from simple bodies to organs to organisms. That Aristotle assigns organic beings the highest rank among beings proper could contradict the thesis that the thing was his prototype of being. After all, according to Aristotle, life and the principle of life, the soul, are ecstatic as such. The living as a perceiving being is beside itself. As subsisting being it lives in the passage of elements and as generating being it is part of a chain. And yet, Aristotle defines being also, via its autonomy, as substance and as constituted by the four causes.

There is no unambiguous equivalence for the expression substance in Aristotle’s texts. However, Aristotle certainly attributes to ousia (ουσία, the true being), the autonomy that will later be characteristic of substance, that is, autonomy in a logical and perseverance in a temporal sense. Being is, according to Aristotle, that of which one predicates something but which does not appear as a predicate itself. Further, it perseveres in the face of changing terms (of place, quality, or quantity) and thereby makes movement possible. In itself, it can only come-to-be or pass away. The doctrine of the four causes, finally, shows that Aristotle was not only oriented towards the thing in his analysis of being but, more precisely, even towards the thing produced through craft. Being, in his sense, is determined by the four possible answers to the question dia ti (διὰ τι, for what reason?). It is composed of matter, it has a form, it has an efficient cause, and it is aligned with a purpose. A frequently used example of the constitution of being through form and material is the statue: a material (marble, bronze) is given a form (Hercules). However, Aristotle does not even take account of the double function of form here, namely as the form of matter and as the form presenting Hercules. (This double relationship is much more clearly articulated in Plato’s analysis of images in the dialogue of the Sophist.) Certainly, the form’s efficacy is more profound in the case of living beings than it is in the work of artisans, but the model also applies in the realm of the organic: matter is shaped by form. Indeed, to impute an efficient cause as another constituent of each individual being only makes sense in the case of a type of being that does not have the principle of its motion within itself, that is, in the case of technical being. In the same way, the determination of the final cause for each being’s end results precisely from a type of being whose end lies outside of itself, in an instrumental use. One can say that the practical analysis of a being as it is conducted in a technical context, namely the analysis according to producer, material, form, and purpose of the thing, has guided the theoretical analysis of being as such. Aristotle accordingly regarded the supreme being, organic essence, already as an automaton.

Similarly, the thing evidently prevails in Cartesian ontology. This cannot be shown quite as directly, though, as the use of res for both extended and thinking substance might suggest. In part, it only becomes apparent via Kant’s retrospective analysis of the paralogisms of pure reason, in which he shows that the supposed determinations of the self are unwarranted transferences from thing-ontology; in part, it depends on the concept of substance itself: substance is, according to Descartes (1985: § 51), a being that is independent in its being (only relatively independent, though, since only God is truly independent). Furthermore, it is a being that is thought to carry determinacies. Clearly, then, something like free-floating qualities cannot exist, and relations must have a fundamentum in re, be founded in the thing.

The prevalence of the thing in ontology is very clear again in Kant: the object in experience is the actual being. Something like the night could, of course, be an object in experience, or the air or atmospheres. However, the object in experience is, according to Kant, first of all a substance carrying accidents, that is, it is conceived within the schema thing-property. In addition, the further analysis in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1768) shows that substance is thought of as matter, and that in external perception the object is enclosed within finite limits, that it is therefore a body (see G. Böhme, 1986). Very much to Kant’s credit, he does show that a self is not a being of this nature, but this leads him to the conclusion that the self is merely a noumenon.

Heidegger, finally, accords an ecstatic mode of being to the human being but, precisely because of this, not to the rest of being. The main types of non-human being are the present-to-hand and the ready-to-hand – the first a mere physical thing with its properties, the latter equipment with its suitabilities. In the realm of non-human ontology, the thing thus retains its prototypical character for being in general.

Life within the world of things

The thing’s prevalence in ontology is astonishing. Why is the question, of what being is as such, not rather oriented towards powers, appearances, or figures? Whatever is to be considered as being must always be reified. Quite likely, the prevalence of the thing is closely linked with the fact that practical human life is primarily a life in a world of things. What that means, however, is not easy to say. It might simply mean that humans lead a bodily existence. In that case, other being would be something like a body, but in a certain sense precisely also the other of the body. However, perceiving bodily existence in movement, nourishment, and physical togetherness with others does not directly lead to privileging thing-ness. Bodily self-experience does not map onto thing-categories; that is, the way in which things are experienced cannot be understood as a projected experience of the body. Perhaps the reverse is correct: the engagement with other beings enables the experience of one’s body primarily as a solid. One experiences its surface and thereby the boundary between inside and outside, one experiences touchability and localization, the competition with other bodies for space, one seeks and creates distance, and one experiences that handling is crucial for getting on. Bodily existence is certainly poured out in space, atmospherically affected and in bodily communication with other beings.1 However, the will to self-assertion creates a distance and thereby a relative localization among bodies, it grapples with the impermeability and inertia of other beings and uses their temporal constancy, certainty, finiteness, and thereby manageability, for its own persistence. The thing becomes prototypical of all being because it is the most reliable support available to humans in their care for self-preservation. With Sartre, one could also say that being-for-itself, permanently imperilled, chooses being-in-itself as an ideal.

The closure of the thing within the main ontological models

Newton once said in his dispute with Descartes that it was possible to abstract all determinations from a body, save expansion and perceptibility, without taking away anything of its essence, that is, to be a body (‘De Gravitatione et aequipondio fluidorum’ in Newton, Hall, & Hall, 1962: 122, 139–140). This determination of perceptibility as an essential predicate of the body or the thing in general is extraordinarily rare. A thing is usually characterized in itself, without regard for the possibility of being for others or for something other, without consideration of whether such being-for-others might even be part of its essence. Within thing-ontology, therefore, the basic determinations of being as such portray the thing generally as enclosed-in-itself. There are significant exceptions to this rule, though, which will be treated in the next section. First, however, let us turn to models in which the thing is something closed and enclosed-in-itself.

Through eidos (appearance) Plato had still characterized being as appearing. For him, a being’s being is exactly its emergence in a specific manner. The sun is therefore the most suitable analogue by which to study what makes an idea an idea. It is astonishing to see how the same expression eidos idea) subsequently turns inward, as it were, in (the writing of) his student Aristotle. The eidos or form of a thing has its essential function, according to Aristotle, not in an external relationship but in an interior one: it is the way in which something is a something. Eidos as eidos of a matter is its organizational form. As the integration of internal components, the eidos is simultaneously the principle of demarcation towards the outside and of autonomy. In higher beings, that is, in organic beings, eidos determines the difference between self and other and provides the being in its forms of movement with independence from external stimuli: nature-like, the being contains the principle of its own movement. This inward turn of eidos already amounts to the possibility that a thing’s essence cannot be directly perceived, that is, that the correspondence between essence and its appearance is not without problems.

As with eidos, the property of a thing can be conceived turning both outward and inward, and as something by which a thing shows and makes itself present. This, however, is not the case in the classical ontology of thing and property, substance and accident. Properties are what a thing has. All determinations of substance determine the substance. In saying, for instance, that a table is blue, this blue is condensed into the table, as it were, it is merely something that adheres to the table. Blueness is not understood as a form of the table’s spatio-corporeal presence. This is particularly obvious in the case of properties such as heavy. The weight of a body is understood as a property of this body, which is in it or on it, even though one knows, of course, that it is only its relative relatedness with other bodies, in particular, the earth. In reality, heaviness describes a mutual exposure of bodies resulting from their simultaneous presence in space. Nevertheless, heaviness is understood as a kind of possession of the body that it carries around.

The self-closure of the thing becomes particularly apparent in thing models that presume a differentiation of primary and secondary qualities. For in that instance, the properties that a thing truly has are distinguished from those that belong to it, or are ascribed to it, only in relation to a thinking subject. The will to objectivity prevailing in the distinction or enforcement of primary and secondary qualities assumes that the thing is essentially what it is in itself, and that it can then be additionally discovered. Heidegger called this form of being quite accurately presence at hand (Vorhandenheit). The present at hand just lies there, almost dead; it does not show itself, one can only chance upon it. The extreme example of such an ontology is Descartes’ res extensa (corporeal substance). Here, a thing is basically characterized by nothing but its closure and self-enclosure. It is inactive and limited.

Alternative thing models

The thing’s closure in itself is not typical of the history of ontology in general. However, it seems to designate the dominant line in this history, or that which, looking at it in retrospect from the point of view of modern ontology, appears to be the dominant line. Even though the first model of a closed thing derives from the inward orientation of Aristotle’s eidos, it is he, in particular, who determines the principal substances of everything, the simple bodies of fire, water, earth, and air, ecstatically. Simple bodies are perceptible as such and therefore characterized by sensitive qualities. Moist/dry, cold/warm are, as constitutive aspects of simple bodies, the modes in which they are sensibly present. Characteristically, when faced with such determination, one gains the impression that the simple bodies are almost dissolved or volatilized in this way, or that one has to assume an entity about the qualities warm or cold, moist or dry that is, while it shows itself in this way, nevertheless also determined in itself. Aristotle, in talking about a first matter (prima materia), takes account of such speculations, while at the same time closing the door on them by stating that first matter exists never in itself but in each case in the appearance of one of the four elements only.

A truly impressive counter model to the main line of European ontology can be found in Jakob Böhme’s conception of a thing (see G. Böhme, 1989). This is evident already in his theory of the constitution of each thing through the seven forces or seven ghosts of God. On the one hand, these forces are themselves qualities such as tart, bitter, and sweet, on the other, sound belongs to thingness as the sixth constitutive moment. Rather than sound, Böhme might occasionally also say whiff or smell or taste – what is clear is that he includes stepping-out-of-oneself or revealing-oneself in thingness. In the context of creation theology, Böhme is in any event able to take the world as a whole, as well as every single thing, as a revelation by God, as a word that is spoken. Böhme’s basic model of a thing is a musical instrument, as his text De Signatura Rerum (The signature of things, 1651) shows. A thing has a nature or an essence which is, however, not perceptible of itself nor as such. On the other hand, the thing’s whole structure is oriented towards the revelation of its essence. The body is a sounding board, and it has an attunement resulting from its cut, covering, or cavities. Böhme calls this attunement a signature. The signature is restraint, as it were, or the form of articulation by which a thing can express itself. The expression – now called tune or reverberation – originates with the excitation of essence by the spirit. This is, on the whole, the spirit of God, but single beings, particularly animate beings, also have their own spirit of volition (Willensgeist).

Important about Böhme’s thing model is, on the one hand, the strict distinction between inside and outside, that is, the principal imputation of a hidden essence, and, on the other hand, the fact that the thing is on the whole oriented towards revelation: ‘and there is nothing that is created or born in Nature, but it also manifesteth its internal form externally, for the internal doth continually labour or work it self forth to manifestation’ (J. Böhme, 1651).

Among the so-called thing models above, Aristotle’s with its final cause and Heidegger’s concept of the ready-to-hand’s mode of being with its referential structure contain, of course, elements by which the thing points beyond itself and thus can be thought of or experienced as stepping-out-of-itself. This potentiality is given particularly with expressly social things, such as symbols like marriage rings, valuables like wares or particularly with signs (see Heidegger’s analysis of the arrow in § 17 of Being and Time, 2010: 77f). Technical things, by comparison, become increasingly systemic, that is, they are what they are as components of larger systems. Therefore, they can be differentiated only with difficulty and defined in their essence only through relationships. Even if one can almost speak of a tendency towards the thing’s dissolution, this systemic character of thingness still does not mean the same as what I want to elaborate under the heading of the ecstatic here. For the relational and systemic character of things can also be enclosed and does not necessarily have to manifest. Thus, the description of a telephone is not likely to include the systemic character of this object, while an attempt at definition will always come across it very quickly. It is quite possible that things close up in very particular ways as they become technical. On the other hand, final cause, suitability, value, or system function can be connected to a whole spectrum of ways in which these essential forms of being-beyond-oneself manifest. This will be explored later. For now, let me mention just a few examples that indicate the gist of the argument: a tool can suggest its utility through its form; a commodity its value through its presentation; and a technical object its function and manner of use through labels.

The thing

From various perspectives, it might seem that a thing-ontology is obsolete today, and therefore a correction of the existing one is superfluous. However, if it is correct that traditional basic concepts in ontology may obstruct the project of an aesthetics of nature, then it is important to break those barriers, as it were, from within this ontology. As the above considerations have shown, European ontology has essentially been a thing-ontology, and within it the thing has been thought of at important points as closed in on itself. It further transpired that the different conceptions of the thing have their origin in different contexts of practice: tools of trade, crafts products, and musical instruments all represent thing models. Such practice contexts are characteristically determined by manipulation and keeping at arm’s length. In that regard, an important question is how a thing must be thought when it is seen more openly in its ecstasies. From there, the question arises whether consequentially the privilege of the thing in ontology must generally be jettisoned.

Developments in the natural sciences allow us today to see nature no longer simply as a context of reciprocal effects between things. For a long time, it was thought that cognition and communication as modes of being were to be reserved for the human being. To impute an address on the part of nature to the human feeling of being addressed by nature seemed an anthropomorphism; to impute expression to nature, to ascribe a language to it, was better left to the Romantics. The advent of the concept of information in the natural sciences, as well as the systems view of nature, has changed matters significantly. If the natural sciences demonstrate something akin to cognition already at the level of molecules, notions of appearing and response will also be acceptable again at the phenomenological level. The Greek term physis (φύσις, nature) took arising and flowering as its central characteristics; the Latin term natura centres on giving birth. Both imply coming-forth, appearing, and the difference between closure and openness. Why should we not accept the ecstatic as an essential feature of nature, in its entirety as much as in every single thing? Is not every flower proof that natural things present themselves, out of themselves and for others?

Thus, we must characterize things according to the forms of their presence. I deliberately do not say determine, since this traditionally means isolating and excluding. Forms of presence, by contrast, are modes in which a thing characteristically steps out of itself. I call these ecstasies. Of course, one could also speak of forms of givenness since we, as exploring humans, experience these forms of the presence of things as forms in which things are present to us. Since we have learned to understand ourselves as nature, however, and since the presence of things no longer means their givenness for a worldless and bodiless subject but an interference with one’s own bodily presence, we can conjecture that forms of self-presencing can simultaneously be discerned in the forms of the givenness of things.

So, what are the ecstasies of things? How should they be named? One method is certainly to reinterpret the existing categories of things as such as ecstasies, or to show them to be reified ecstasies.

Spatiality lends itself primarily to this purpose. The spatiality of things has been understood as locatability (occupying a topos) and as the encompassing of a volume. But how does a thing show that it is emplaced or that it is voluminous? There is no short answer to these questions, especially when one considers that this way of thinking about the thing implies always, after all, a particular relationship between appearance and self-closure. To be emplaced or voluminous may exactly not be visible. Provisionally, one could say, however, that locality appears in the constellation between things, through the formation of gaps and interstices, and thereby tightness and expanse. Potentially implying both impenetrability and opaqueness, volume appears as opacity, namely through the formation of an enveloping surface.

The Platonic eidos can be interpreted as the second form of presence, a manifestation of what a thing is. When questioning what the ecstasies of a thing are, it is most astonishing indeed that Plato considers appearance as an answer to the question concerning the being of Being and, for each being, concerning its essence. What we miss ontologically about most occidental thing-conceptions is the explicit indication of a thing’s dimension, along which it brings itself into appearance. Yet, here, this dimension of appearance seems to have completely absorbed the question concerning the thing itself: the thing is identical with its making an appearance or, better, its having made an appearance. On the one hand, this testified to a great trust in the openness of things: they do not hide anything, they do not deceive, and the face they show us is not just a symptom; on the other hand, this conception assumes that the being of things is altogether emergence. This, of course, presupposes that a general recipient can be imputed for this emergence, be it a world-soul or reason. For us, eidos can only be one, if prominent ecstasy among others. The classical work of art, specifically the statue, seems to me the basic model for things that are ecstatic in this way: in a certain way, they are what they show. Their essence and meaning is, after all, to render something or someone evident and present. In the case of a statue, one can ask who or what it is, and the answer will be, that is Socrates, or that is a herma Curiously, one can designate precisely these things, which always appear as prototypes of things whose being is exhausted in presentation, also as things that are precisely not what they are. After all, an image of Socrates is properly an image and not Socrates. Therefore, the idea of being as selfhood arises, as a reaction against being as presentation, and that in two ways: on the one hand, there is eidos itself, that which only presents a thing (the table as such, as opposed to the concrete table), on the other hand Socrates himself, for whom being-Socrates is only one manifestation of himself. The generalization of this way of being ecstatic is of course intimately connected with an aristocratic, free culture; with an identification of the good and the beautiful, the aesthetic and the ethic; with the belief that the Gods are present in their statues. Today, ecstasy as the direct manifestation of essence appears to us only as a special stroke of luck or as an ideal, which normally cannot be realized. It was a pursuit of Bauhaus-Design, for instance, where form was to express function and nothing else.

Another form of being ecstatic is physiognomy, of which two modes evidently need further differentiation. One is given in Böhme’s concept of the signature, according to which the physiognomy of a thing is, as it were, the screen through which its essence comes into appearance; that is, it is the restriction placed on the thing’s expression by its material constitution. The other conception of physiognomy (or, the thing’s being-physiognomic) considers the thing’s manifest forms as traces, as the routes taken towards its manifestation, as it were. In yet another conception of physiognomy, a thing’s traits themselves constitute the way in which the thing shows itself. This threefold way of understanding the physiognomy of the thing as ecstasies needs further explanation.

Physiognomy, in any case, is not the same as eidos. To say that a thing has or shows a physiognomy always implies the difference between inside and outside, between (more or less hidden) essence and expression. Where the three conceptions differ is in the role the physiognomic traits themselves are given in the expression of the thing.

In the first case, as in the second, expression proper is still distinguished from physiognomic traits. That attention is paid to the traits at all, instead of exposing or opening oneself to the expressions themselves, springs partially from a distancing and analytic comportment and partially from the fact that the thing sometimes indeed does not express itself, that is, sleeps or is dead. One wants to determine from the traits how the thing might principally express itself or has expressed itself as a rule. This is particularly evident in physiognomic characterology, where Kretschmar’s constitutional theory tends towards the first type (physiognomy proper, that is, the reading of facial traits) and graphology tends towards the second. In the first case, it is not necessary to impute a particular essence that freely expresses itself. This essence can also be simply free or an as yet undetermined potency. Physiognomy qua signature first gives the expression articulation and contour. In that way, the signature is something that is also expressed in each expression but is neither the act of expression itself nor its content. It is, rather, a style, a tonality, an attunement. Thus, to identify the signature as such is not to recognize the essence of something but only the limits of its expressive capacity.

The second conception of physiognomy assumes a more or less determined essence that leaves permanent traces in the flow of its expression. A person’s facial features, like laughter lines, give evidence of a cheerful nature; hand writing retains the trace of lively movement – in the same way as a tree’s movement of growth is contained in the patterns of its bark, or the blossoming of a flower is preserved in the sway of its stem and the gesture of its petals. In that way, physiognomic traits are themselves revelation, even if a deposited, dead one. However, they also always point beyond themselves, or can be read and experienced as traces, and thereby suggest the experience of an expression whose result they merely are.

This leads us to the third conception of physiognomy which does not require the imputation of an inner essence that manifests through traits, or in them as a result of facial expressions. Rather, the traits themselves are taken as the mode in which a thing presents itself. There is no need to read them as traces of movement, rather, they themselves invite movement. Schmitz very aptly spoke of ‘movement impressions’ (Bewegungsanmutungen) here. The forms a thing can take provide a feeling for the ways in which one may embrace and handle it; the lines of a mountain range invite the eyes to follow them. Thus, the thing ecstatically reaches, through its forms and character, into a space of potential movements (Figure 2.2).

Colour is a special ecstasy. It has mostly been regarded as the property of a thing and insofar limited to it – or as a mere perception of the subject, a subjective reaction to certain objective properties of the thing, to primary qualities. This dichotomization, however, overlooks a third possibility, namely that one ecstasy of things might consist in being-colourful. Certainly, being blue is something that belongs to the side of the thing, not to the side of the subject. Being blue on the side of the thing corresponds to seeing blue on the side of the subject. It does not follow, of course, that being blue is something that determines the thing in and of itself – it is, though, the colour of its presence: colour is the visible presence of a thing. As such, it is also simultaneously always spatial. Through colour, the thing asserts its presence in space and radiates into it. Through its colourfulness, the individual thing organizes space as a whole, that is, it enters into constellations with other things or it centres the space if its colour is overwhelming, at the same time tinging and tinting all other things. As present, the colourful thing can be localized yet, in a certain way, its colourfulness is everywhere.

The other sensitive qualities should likewise be interpreted as forms of presence or ecstasies of things. This should be all the easier since sound or voice or smell are, after all, energetic or material emanations by which things fill a space and thereby evidence their presence. These ecstasies are used explicitly by some natural beings, humans included, to mark their presence and to indicate who or what is present. One can see, then, that something like language rests upon the ecstasies of things: seen in this way, language is primarily expression and self-marking and communication only secondarily.

An interpretation of sensitive qualities as ecstasies could lead one to assume, as psychologists do, a visual, or aural, or olfactory space. However, the legitimacy of this assumption is very doubtful; already Aristotle in his theory of the four elements had great difficulty justifying the existence of separate realms. Precisely when looking for the origin of qualities in the thing, one would hardly assume manifold spaces in which the thing is present simultaneously. This will become particularly evident when analysing so-called synaesthesia. These are always taken to mean that the subject shifts associatively from one sensory realm to another on the basis of experience. A red hue, for instance, is perceived as warm because the colour usually coincides with a sensation of warmth. More to the point, however, synaesthesia seem to indicate that the parametrization of experience can always only unsatisfactorily render the experienced presence of the thing.

Conclusion: Ontology and aesthetics

With the possible exception of Hegel’s work, ontology and aesthetics have hardly been seen together in philosophy so far. De facto, ontology – at least in its main stream version – has obstructed aesthetics by interpreting being according to thing-schemata. Ontology also assumed that the thing is what it is, and that it can then somehow also be aesthetically effective or be grasped subjectively. In sum, classical ontology’s obstruction was its failure to conceive the thing essentially as aistheton sensible). This is most clearly expressed in the sentence, otherwise so true, ‘existence is not a predicate’. According to this ontology, one can endow the thing with all its predicates and then still ask whether it exists or not. That is, of course, also the case when predicates are taken to be determinations and thereby constraints on something. If, however, one understands what is designated by these predicates as ecstasies, or appreciates it in its being ecstatic, then such a statement makes no sense. The sun shines, the dog barks, the stone is warm – yes, but then also the flower is blue – all these phrases designate things in their being-there.

Classical ontology determines thingness through essence, unity, autarchy. These are, of course, important and even indispensable determinations of the thing. From the perspective of aesthetics, though, these ontological determinations are one-sided and not properly understood in what they designate and achieve. Granted, a thing has to be something determinate, have unity, and be, in what it is, in some way independent. Otherwise, it would not be a particular, individually nameable, locatable thing. It would dissolve, merge with its environment and perhaps only shine forth briefly. Only once these tendencies are included in the thing’s ontology does it become apparent that there must be something that holds a thing together and makes it individually nameable. After all, classical ontology has designated space as something external to things. Granted, they can be in a place and, via their placement, enter into positional relationships with other things. However, that almost assumes that they could also be taken out of space, that they are what they are even without being in space. At best, the fact that they fill a space and have volume, that is, their expansion, still indicates that spatiality essentially belongs to them. However, these determinations, and particularly the Cartesian one that defines them as res extensa, still suggest that the spatiality in things is the limited interior space they enclose, as if space as a whole did not concern them. That, indeed, prevents the apperception of their ecstatic being – for, as ecstatic, they almost essentially step outside of themselves. But where? In any case outside, into space.

To sum up retrospectively what is needed to grasp a thing as an ecstatic being: first, there are principles of self-containment. Basically, these will be the classical principles of unity, essence, autarchy, and perhaps identity – but newly interpreted. Second, being needs to be principally understood in its polarity, that is, through the tension of openness and closure. If being is something rising up, a coming forth, it can neither be determined solely according to its having-come-forth nor thought of as entirely closed in on itself. Third, the principles of ecstatic being will have to include the contrast of sleeping and waking. This is a revival of the Aristotelian contrast between dynamis (δύναμις, potential) and energeia actuality). If coming forth is part of being, then coming forth itself is a performance of actuality. However, this implies simultaneously that what comes forth does not always have to come forth at the current moment, that is, it can also remain latent, or remain latent for a while. Thus, one could also say that a principle of excitation belongs to ecstatic being. On the other hand, one will have to assume that things – unlike mere appearances – have at least a permanent basic presence – and this, then, may indeed be related to their essence.

The individual ecstasies of the thing are, as already shown, not really predicates but more properly modes of being, forms of presence. That means, however, that things are not actually determined by ecstasies. The very fact that they transcend themselves in them renders them indeterminate. It follows that talk about being can no longer consist of definitions. A definition determines things in their essence and, as the word already indicates, delimits them. A report about the mode in which it is experienced is more appropriate for ecstatic being, or a description of this being, that is, a description of being in its rising up. The thing as ecstatic being is radically understood as tode ti, as ‘this here’. It can only be experienced genuinely in its separate actual presence. According to classical ontology and logic, this should mean that it cannot be grasped linguistically at all. That, however, is not at all the case: to start with, it can be named. In a description, in contrast to the traditional sentence logic going back to Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, even the utterance of a single expression is significant. When one says the sun, this means as much as the sun rises up, the sun is here. While the mode of this rising up and coming forth is left undetermined, the individual thing is designated as coming forth, or even called forth. Further, as described above, characteristically descriptive sentences: the sun shines, the dog barks, specify or designate the modes of coming forth. This process of verbalization is not at all impossible, as traditional logic following the principle individuum est ineffabile would have it. This follows from the fact that description does not start from the general, trying to make being more and more specific, but rather names the individual and calls it forth. The naming of things addresses them not only as something that has come forth but also as sources of coming forth. Therefore, the individuality of things thus named is not grounded in their specific way of coming forth but in the darkness and inexhaustibility of the ground from which they emerge.

A description is something principally different from a definition. It is for this reason that there are things or, better put, modes of addressing things by particular expressions that can only be defined and not described and, in the reverse, only be described and not defined. A flower, for example, cannot be defined but certainly described. A telephone could perhaps still be described but whatever one would say would remain rather external to what one means by telephone – one can really only define a telephone. To describe a thing – and by that I now mean strictly to describe a thing in its presence (i.e., not to provide, for instance, a description of a function or a machine, which would be more like a definition) – means to enter a relationship with this thing in the presence. Therefore, the description one supplies of a thing always stands, itself, in an ontic relationship with that thing. It is something like a picture. Both description and pictorial representation of a thing are not the thing itself, but they are meant to mediate the presence of the thing for someone. In their description or pictorial representation, things are withdrawn from their ecstasies. In De Anima, Aristotle determined this withdrawal very nicely by saying that a perceiver takes in the eidos without matter. Indeed, a thing’s ecstasies are lifted off in description or pictorial representation, that is, off their source and are only mediated as such. Thus, description or pictorial representation themselves belong to the having-come-forth of the thing; they are lifted off (i.e., further articulated and marked but, on the other hand, also isolated and immobilized) ecstasies. Accordingly, the elements of a description or picture can certainly be heterogeneous to the thing. All that matters is that they allow – like the ecstasies of the thing itself – the thing to come forth and to be present. The relative autonomy accruing to phantasms vis-à-vis things and the free miscibility of their characters are, however, something quite different from the connection of concepts, whose objective reality, that is, their correspondence to things, could still be queried. Things themselves already step out of themselves and constitute the stage of fantastic events. In this way, aesthetics is set free by ontology itself and no longer remains bound to its serious rules.

1See Schmitz, System der Philosophie, particularly Vol. II 1 Der Leib (1965).