So the promise of the work of art is the promise of understanding and belonging to the world. Today, however, everything about this promise is haunted by Heidegger's claim that ours is an era lacking art as a real possibility: in other words, that the bringing forth that is the defining trait and promise of the work of art has been usurped by the production and composition of the Gestell, which has foreclosed the space of free appearance. To use Heidegger's vocabulary, one might say that the claim, the worry, is that Machenschaft has overtaken Hervorbringen as the form in which we understand the character of making today. But Heidegger is not alone in giving voice to such a judgment that this historical present, this now, is defined by the closure of the space of appearance and the impoverishment of the world. With a similar sense of a foreclosure, Kommerell speaks of our time as one in which the sense for gesture has been lost. Describing the age of Jean Paul and the philosophy of German Idealism, Kommerell writes that this was the time in which a decline began since both “derive from the situation of the bourgeoisie in which the forms of life have lost their intimacy [Innigkeit] and simplicity [Einfalt]…. Completely unencumbered spirit is a consequence of the bourgeoisie that has lost its gestures.”%1 About this loss of gesture, Agamben remarks that “the more gestures lost their ease under the pressure of unknown powers, the more life became indecipherable. And once the simplest and most everyday gestures had become as foreign as the gesticulations of marionettes, humanity…was ready for massacre Precisely in this idea…[that] human beings, liberating themselves from all sacredness, communicate to each other their lack of secrets as their most proper gesture, Kommerell's criticism reaches the political dimension.”2 Finally, a different yet no less damning assessment of our historical moment is expressed by Roberto Calasso when he writes that
much was implicit in the Greek experience that has been lost to us today. When we look at the night sky, our first impression is one of amazement before a random profusion scattered across a dark background. Plato could still recognize “the friezes in the sky.” And he maintained that those friezes were the “most beautiful and exact” images in the visible order. But when we…see the Milky Way…we are incapable of perceiving any order, let alone a movement within that order. No, we immediately start to think of distances, of the inconceivable light-years. We have lost the capacity, the optical capacity even, to place myths in the sky.3
In other words, our relation to the sky today is determined calculatively; we are no longer able to find ourselves addressed by the stars. One might say that we are no longer capable of seeing the heavens as a text. Others—Nietzsche, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, to name only a few of many—are just as sharp in their critique, and so to take these critiques of the present age into account only adds to the sense that the doors that open upon understanding have already slammed shut in our time. Their diagnosis of our age might differ, but the destiny of the diagnosis, its fatality, remains the same.
In whatever terms this criticism of our age is formulated, the common point of such remarks is that, in our time, a space of understanding our world has been shut down. One can characterize this space in many ways: as the space of the appearance of the beautiful, of gesture and so of interpretation and understanding, of art itself. Such a space of appearance has been colonized by habits of mind and forces that drive history to give an account of the world according to some calculus of speed, measurement, abstraction. Histories and analyses are undertaken to account for this condition, this loss: metaphysics, modernity, one-dimensionality, technological reason, the dialectic of the Enlightenment, nihilism, and repression are all among the “causes” named in these accounts. But, while the roots of this closure and growing unfamiliarity that characterize the present age might be identified in a variety of ways, the consequences of this condition tend to be similarly diagnosed; namely, that a peculiar and paradoxical distress characterizes our present age, one that is typified by the strange alchemy of an increasing sense of what can be known coupled with a decreasing sense of what is understood.4 We suffer, one might say, from a loss of orientation, and this orientation is not a matter of cognition but of understanding. What is most important at this point in history is to come to recognize that this orientation defines our lives as able to be ethical beings, that is, as beings able to be addressed by, and respond to, the world. The loss of this orientation, this openness to the address of the world, is, at the same time, the loss of that which lets us be responsive and responsible beings in the world. This loss that is the defining trait of our age is a profound loss, since it is the loss of possibilities.
And yet: this distress and loss of orientation is, in a strange sense, the hope for us to pursue since they are peculiar announcements—presentations as almost photographic negatives—of what is absent for us. In other words, this alienation, this lack of stories in the sky, this loss of a sense for gesture, is itself also something of a clue. What this means is that what is needed in our time presents itself in the form of an absence, of something lacking, something past and, perhaps, even dead. This absence cannot be cognized as an object but, if it is to be understood, needs to be felt. For this reason (and others), mourning, which is a felt relation to an absence, has become a special concern of our time.5 This, in part at least, is why Heidegger found Hölderlins work, which he characterized as driven by “sacred mourning,” so decisive for our present.6 In other words, our age is indexed to a sense of what it is missing—at least that is the hope of our age: “where danger is, there rescue grows as well.”7
Heidegger's judgment about our historical present is fierce and relentless. While one can argue that his grim assessment of these times has not changed in any essential respect, one must nonetheless recognize that Heidegger's assessment of the prospects for overcoming our present condition did indeed change over the course of his career so that there were periods during which he found reason for some optimism that a different, freer future might open up. Whenever Heidegger did find some glimmer of an opening to a better future, he found it in conjunction with the experience opened up by the work of art. Beginning with his “The Origin of the Work of Art,” moving through discussions of Sophocles and Hölderlin, Rilke and George (and so privileging poetry over painting), and up to the great enthusiasm that accompanied his discovery of Klee, Heidegger saw in works of art (or, more precisely, in individual artists) some opening to a future that nourished rather than drained the roots of life in our time. But, after the burst of optimism fed by Klee's work, Heidegger seemed to decide that this opening had quietly, but surely, closed—at least for now—and that now “only a God can still save us.”8 Nonetheless, others—here I have argued that Gadamer's hermeneutics stands out—still see the promise of the work of art, and indeed the claim in such cases tends to be that this promise comes into view precisely because of, not despite, the desperate character of our time. I do not believe that one can give a clear accounting of why it is that some believe the promise of the work of art is still viable today and why others hold that path to be blocked for us. Is it depth of insight or simply personal temperament? What measure can there be to fathom the depths of the problem we face in this historical moment? What gauge of the force of art's promise to break through the closure of our time? But, however one judges this situation, it is clear that the sweep of the questions posed is enormous and the stakes profound. In my own case, I have come to hold a view in the somewhat impossible middle ground between these two views, one that seems to resonate with Benjamin's comment that “only for the sake of those without hope is hope given to us.”9 In other words, while I do not see much reason to hold to the optimism one finds expressed in Gadamer, I also have come to believe that there is no path open today other than to pursue this opening, this promise that belongs to the work of art and aesthetic experience, since it is a promise that promises to change us. So long as we can still feel the tug of the beautiful and sense the difference that defines the work of art, it seems that some hope, however faint, still remains.
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There is a shared heritage among those who have pursued this sense that the work of art opens us to a different understanding of our world and our place in it. I am referring to the heritage that arises from Kant's contributions in his third Critique. Kant, whom Hölderlin would refer to as “the Moses of our nation”10 precisely because of the contributions of the third Critique, was the first to lay out the real promise of the work of art, and indeed he did so in ways that seem to have outstripped his own understanding of his achievement in this regard. Philosophy divides after Kant over this decision about what is promised by the work of art. After Kant, two philosophical paths seem possible: one is defined by those who are ready to explore the real contributions of art, even to the extent that those contributions cannot be taken up into the project of philosophy, while the other path is defined by those who resist this opening and remain wedded to the project of conceptuality. My intention has not been to write a history of the path that has pursued this promise of art, but I do believe that it is important to recognize how it is that the philosophical projects laid out by Heidegger and Gadamer, both of whom I have singled out as exemplary in their efforts to articulate this promise, need to be seen as the inheritors of that history that runs from Kant through Hegel, Schelling, Schiller, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.11 In particular, it is important to recognize how hermeneutics is to be understood as that philosophical approach that has finally thematized the question of the relation of art and truth as an ontological and not simply aesthetic question. Or better, hermeneutics recognizes the insight that is first hinted at by Kant: that aesthetic experience opens up the questions of first philosophy in an original manner. But there is an aspect of Kant's achievement in the Critique of Judgment that is largely missing in the way that achievement has been carried forward in the present age. What is missing and most in need of being recovered is the real ethical meaning of this promise of art.12 This is what is still to be learned from Kant, and this is one way in which the orientation that has been lost in the present age might begin to be recovered.
Kant situates the questions of aesthetic experience and judgment within the larger horizon of judgment in general. More precisely, he situates it within the realm of reflective judgment, which is that form of judgment that must operate apart from the rule of the concept and its consequences. For Kant, the preeminent form of such reflective judgment is found in aesthetic judgment. The argument that I have pursued in this book is that this character of being apart from the concept and its operations, apart from the logos, is the great challenge that is put to philosophy by the work of art. It is this challenge that some, like Heidegger and Gadamer, have taken up. But what is missing from Heidegger and Gadamer, and what one finds only implicitly in Kant, is that it is first in the departure from this rule of the concept that the questions of ethical life begin to open up in the most original sense. What one finds in being ready to make this move into that which cannot be grasped by the concept or conceived according to the imperatives of the category is that one is making the move into the most elemental dimensions of being human; it is the move into the essential character of human freedom as abyssal, as inconceivable. This departure from the rule of the concept and its law demands a profound transformation of the conditions of understanding. This transformation is, I believe, what is needed for any real opening of the realm of ethical understanding to that which Heidegger called for when he spoke of an “original ethics.”13
When I outlined the impulses and concerns that would shape the discussions and arc of this book, the final issue mentioned was this conviction that the ethical stakes of these aesthetic matters were the real significance—and measures—of these discussions about the promise of the work of art. In that context, I referred to Plutarch's word ethopoiein, which means something like “to bring into being poetically one way of being” or “to shape (or form) one's character.” There is an intimate link holding the two roots of this word–ethos and poiein–together. Theirs is such a powerful intimacy that one eventually comes to recognize the impossibility of thinking one of these root words without the other. To think and understand the full import and sense of ethos for us—ethos in its original sense such as it is expressed by Heraclitus's remark “ethos anthropoi daimon”14–one needs to understand the manner in which ethos most properly comes into being, that is, the coming into being according to operations of poiein.15 Likewise, in order to think the operations of this coming into being, this fashioning or care of the self, one needs to understand how it is ultimately defined not simply as a poetic production but as a poetic production that opens the space of ethical life. To think this form of production and the character of the space it opens up is the task of philosophy. Saying this serves as a reminder that poetic practices and productions alone do not serve to expose the original space of ethical life, even if such practices place us into that space as a possibility. It is rather the reflection upon such practices that first opens up this otherwise concealed realm of the ethical, the realm in which we are able to be changed, formed, and transformed, that is, the realm in which we belong to the movement of life. This means simply that philosophical reflection and aesthetic experience need each other in order to live up to the possibility inherent in each. This also means that each needs to let its own practices be changed by this encounter. In the case of philosophy, this entails, as I have tried to argue, no longer assuming that the language of the concept has a hegemonic claim to being the language of truth.
In the immediate aftermath of Kant's third Critique, this wedding of aesthetic experience and aesthetic production to the task of philosophical reflection becomes an explicit aim. Thus, one reads the following in the programmatic text that is now titled “The Oldest System Program of German Idealism” (a text that bears the signatures of Hegel, Hölderlin, and Schelling):
I am now convinced that the highest act of reason, the one through which it encompasses all ideas, is an aesthetic act, and that truth and goodness only become sisters in beauty. The philosopher must possess just as much aesthetic power as the poet. Those without aesthetic sense are our literal-minded philosophers. The philosophy of spirit is an aesthetic philosophy…. In this way, poetry gains a higher dignity, in the end she becomes again, what she was in the beginning—the teacher of humankind; for there is no philosophy, no history left, the poetic art alone will survive all the other sciences and arts.16
This aim is also expressed in the notions of Bildung (cultivation/education), Bildungstrieb (formative drive), and Kunsttreib (artistic drive) that become the bywords of this time and give shape to the goals of a range of thinkers and artists from Goethe to Nietzsche.17 But, even though this aim defined the years in Kant's immediate wake, this sense of a partnership, of a reciprocal need, holding philosophy and the realm of the aesthetic together progressively lost the larger, ethical context that Kant had disclosed as so essential. In this way, the full import of the challenge of art and the question of the beautiful to philosophy, the real stakes of these questions, faded as Kant's legacy unfolded. To recover this sensibility and so to move from the ethical through reflection is the task of philosophy today. This means that philosophy must become different; above all, it must open itself to knowing the world in new ways. More basically, it must concern itself with the task of understanding before it ever presumes to lay claim to knowing.
Insofar as the largest concern of this book has been situated within the possibility of what has been called ethopoiein, the fashioning of the ethical self, it should be acknowledged that it has taken up this concern by and large only from the perspective of one of the root meanings of this word, namely poiesis. Insofar as this notion has been addressed at all, it must be said that the focus of this book has been upon the way in which production of the most original sort is exhibited in the way art is brought into being. But, in the end, this book has not pushed far into the way in which ethopoiesis is able to be thought; it has only arrived at the announcement of this task. Ethical life is a question, always a difficulty. The way in which we might orient ourselves ethically in light of what is learned from this analysis of art is still to be sorted out.
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At the outset, I mentioned three other questions that motivated and gave shape to this book and that led to its focus upon the image in the work of art. Those questions were able to be formulated by naming a series of pairs: Heidegger and Klee, word and image, art and truth. A few words should be addressed to these topics as a way of concluding.
To speak of art and truth as essentially bound together is to let the notion of truth undergo a radical revision. In order to make sense of this, a reference to an argument that Kant made, but the consequences of which he did not fully pursue, is helpful. His argument is simple: that the summit of the possibilities of aesthetic experience—namely, the experience of beauty—is defined by a peculiar “quickening” of the feeling of life, and this feeling is so irrefutable, so compelling, that it must be understood to be a priori, as universal and necessary. This aprioricity is so basic that it is not ancillary or adjunct to the experience but part and parcel of it. Simultaneous with this feeling of life is the sense of its a priori quality. In other words, this feeling of the movement of life arrives as an experience as true, and it can only be understood as true. And yet, this experience is fundamentally different from experience that compels us cognitively to speak of its truth; it is so different in fact that Kant finds the aesthetic experience in which the movement of life is disclosed to provide grounds for articulating a completely different way of understanding how it is that the world presents itself in this experience. More precisely, he argues that experience that lets itself be cognized is formed by the schema and the schematism; on the other hand, experience that resists such cognition, and yet is understood to be both universal and necessary in character, is formed by the symbol and the symbolic hypotyposis. But while Kant recognizes the integrity of aesthetic experience in this way, he does not draw the further conclusion that this experience provides the grounds for reconsidering the very idea of truth. Instead, Kant reserves the notion of truth for that which can be cognized. But it is precisely this decision that comes to be questioned by those who follow in Kant's wake. For them, the question of the relation of art and truth, a question that touches upon our understanding of our most elemental experiences, is the pressing question of philosophy in our time. To make the decision, as Gadamer does, that our understanding of truth needs to begin with—not just accommodate, but actually begin with—this compelling felt experience requires that one rethink the character and horizon of truth. In the end, it requires that one come to understand truth as a matter of following the movement of life that is quickened in aesthetic experience. In other words, both art and truth alike need to be understood as matters of this movement, and this in turn means that neither can be thought in conjunction with any notion of representation, copy, correspondence, or correctness. Neither art nor truth has its primary claim to truth in any relation to an object.
Taking this question of the relation of art and truth to heart, not subordinating the idea of truth to what can be cognized or conceptualized from the start, inaugurates a powerful and radical challenge to the conception and practice of philosophy that understands itself with reference to the logos and this logos with reference to the concept. This is the point at which the second question motivating this book, namely, the question of the relation of word and image, comes into play. The long-standing presumption that the word is privileged in thinking and the corollary assumption that the fulfillment of the word is found in the concept (and thus according to the species of universality and necessity that it represents) are called into question by a serious consideration of art. And yet, because painting presents itself as able to be comprehended in some regard and as able to be interpreted, this challenge to the authority of the word—especially the conceptual word—does not mark the limits of how we understand the world so much as it signals an expansion of such understanding. The way the painting lends itself to understanding enlarges the horizon of understanding in general.
One can make sense of this expansion of understanding by seeing how the relation of painting to the movement of life opens up painting as the inscription of gesture, the peculiar and primordial intelligibility of gesture as an idiom in which life articulates and leaves traces of itself. These traces form a text, a web of relations and a form, and as such the space of interpretation is opened. Insofar as painting belongs to this space of interpretation that is inscribed as the text of gesture that repeats the movement of life, painting—and, in the end, the work of art as such—belongs to the project of understanding, the same project that, in the most general sense, defines philosophy. But to learn to interpret the painting, to listen to it and to recognize the distinctive character of its movement, is exceedingly difficult, especially for the philosopher who holds fast to the authority of the concept, the logos, in matters of what can be understood. Here Heidegger's enthusiastic encounter with Klee must count as an exception and something of a model of how such engagements can be productive.
Heidegger's efforts to understand Klee's work on its own terms and not according to philosophical categories that are inappropriate to that work are exemplary, but they are not unique. One finds a similar effort in, among others, Merleau-Ponty's engagement with Cezanne's and Gadamer's turn to Werner Scholz. What makes Heidegger's relation with Klee so distinctive and worth special attention is the way in which his encounter with Klee extends the originality with which Heidegger had pressed upon the question of the work of art throughout his career. However, despite this commitment to pursuing how the relation of art and truth is to be thought, Heidegger, for the most part, did not pay special attention to painting but centered his attentions primarily upon poetry Furthermore, his ambivalence about the possibilities of art—and painting in particular—in the present age worked to cultivate a real suspicion in Heidegger regarding abstract painting. So, his excitement about Klee and his sincere attempt to see and engage Klee's painting on its own terms, as well as the effort to understand Klee's theoretical works, represent a real change in Heidegger's own views. The prospects and promises of Klee's achievements—at least for a brief while—seem to open thinking in new ways for Heidegger. They even seem to provide a path beyond the limitations that define Western and metaphysical frames of understanding the world. Oblique and fragmentary though his written work on Klee is, Heidegger does indeed try to find a way to dialogue with Klee. Even if, in the end, that dialogue never bore the fruit that Heidegger himself hoped to find, there is no question that it opens up questions that should not be ignored. In particular, Klee's emphasis on genesis and his insistence that the painting is a temporal art, the preeminent art of movement itself, point Heidegger—and us—in directions still to be explored. If this opening is to be developed, then the struggle to see and to listen to what might appear in only the most elemental of ways—as gesture, as genesis, as the movement of life inscribing itself—needs to be learned. This is not an easy matter, above all since it entails a change in the most ingrained habits of how we understand the world and ourselves. This is what Rilke meant when he said that the “lesson” of the work of art is that “you must change your life.”18
This change is easily misunderstood (and the reasons for such misunderstanding are themselves worthy of attention). It can slip into connoisseurship, into bourgeois self-satisfaction and the cultivation of a sort of aesthetic classism. But if this happens, what one finds is the consolidation of power, not the change that is summoned by the work. Kant recognized this and found in the authentic summons to change an indication of the importance of nature, for what is unbidden by us, for ethical life: “We judge with admiration a person who has enough taste to judge the products of fine art with correctness and precision, but who happily leaves the room in which one finds those beauties that serve vanity and social pleasures, and turns instead to the beauties of nature in order to find a train of thoughts that can never be fully unraveled.”19 In other words, this change that is summoned by a quickened sense of the movement of life is a simple one, a change not in what one knows but in how one understands. It is, in the end, a profound change in how one lives, and yet there is no imperative, only the smallest shift in orientation toward the world. But this shift alters one's relation to the world in the most basic ways; it is, as I have suggested, a change in one's ethos.
“Ethics” is a word that one should use sparingly and with reluctance today Much-abused, diminished, and relegated to regulation, it is a word that no longer carries with it a sense of the great task and difficulty of human being. Being open to the movement of life, to the gesture that can be inscribed and repeated as the peculiar text that is the work of art, is one way, but only one way, to answer this task and the challenges of ethical life.