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Art is the Setting-into-Work of Truth

29/05/2011 By Kelly Cooper

"Whenever art happens—that is, whenever there is a beginning—a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people's endowment.

Art is the setting-into-work of truth. In this proposition an essential ambiguity is hidden, in which truth is at once the subject and the object of the setting. But subject and object are unsuitable names here. They keep us from thinking precisely this ambiguous nature, a task that no longer belongs to this consideration. Art is historical, and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art happens as poetry. Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning. Art, as founding is essentially historical. This means not only that art has a history in the external sense that in the course of time it, too, appears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away and offers changing aspects for historiology. Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history.

Art lets truth originate. Art, founding preserving, is the spring that leaps to the truth of what is, in the work. To originate something by a leap, to bring something into being from out of the source of its nature in a founding leap—this is what the word origin (German Ursprung, literally, primal leap) means.

The origin of the work of art—that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers, which is to say of a people's historical existence, is art. This is so because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.

We inquire into the nature of art. Why do we inquire in this way? We inquire in this way in order to be able to ask more truly whether art is or is not an origin in our historical existence, whether and under what conditions it can and must be an origin.

Such reflection cannot force art and its coming-to-be. But this reflective knowledge is the preliminary and therefore indispensable preparation for the becoming of art. Only such knowledge prepares its space for art, their way for the creators, their location for the preservers.

In such knowledge, which can only grow slowly, the question is decided whether art can be an origin and then must be a head start, or whether it is to remain a mere appendix and then can only be carried along as a routine cultural phenomenon" (Heidegger 2001:74-75).

Heidegger, Martin
2001[1971] Poetry, Language, Thought. Albert Hofstadter, trans. New York, NY: Perennial Classics.

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Poetry, Language, Thought (Perennial Classics) on Amazon.com

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Heidegger on Truth

08/02/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“To Heidegger the meaning of Being is Time: passing and happening. To him there is no Being’s ideal of permanency; indeed he holds that the task of thinking is to make man sensitive to the passage of time. Thinking opens up the time horizon wherever the daily tendency toward objectivization makes relationships and situations freeze in a false timelessness. Thinking should ‘liquefy,’ it should hand over that-which-is, above all Dasein, to the flow of time; it dissolves the metaphysical world of the beyond, of eternal ideas. Nothing is to have endurance in the ‘turbulence of questions.’

Heidegger has to read Plato against the grain if he is to gain anything from him. This applies to the Platonic Being at rest, in contrast to Heidegger’s time. It also applies to the aspect of ‘truth.’

In Plato there is truth that endures, which therefore has to wait to be discovered by us. The shadow images on the wall are copies of the originals, of the shadow-casting objects that are carried past, behind the watchers, in the light of the fire. A copy relates to an original, yet even the ‘original’ objects are, in relation to the next higher step, the ideas, no more than inadequate copies. True cognition reaches through these copies and discovers the original, that which authentically is. Truth is correctness, the appropriateness of a cognition in relation to the recognized. The perceptions of the cave dwellers are untrue because they comprehend only the appearance while missing the Being appearing to them. For Plate there is the absolute truth of ideas. This can be comprehended in an upsurge of the soul, by thinking between mathematics and mystic ecstasy. For Heidegger, however, there can be no such truth; for him there is only a ‘truth happening’ that takes place in man’s self-relationship and world relationship. Man discovers no truth existing independently of him; he conceives an interpretative horizon-a different one in each epoch-in which the real is given a certain meaning. This concept of truth had been in outline Heidegger in Being and Time and unfolded in his 1930 lecture, ‘On the Essence of Truth.’

Truth, he points out, exists neither on the side of the subject, in the sense of a truthful statement, nor on the side of the object, in the sense of a correct description, but it is a happening unfolding in a double movement-a movement from the world, which reveals itself, emerges, appears; and a movement from the individual, who takes possession of the world and opens it up. This double happening unrolls at the distance at which man is placed with regard to himself and to his world. He is aware of this distance and is therefore also aware of the existence of a world that reveals itself to him and evades him. He is aware of this because he experiences himself as a creature that can show itself and conceal itself. This ‘distanceness’ is the open region of freedom. ‘The essence of truth is freedom’. 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. Only because this openedness exists can man conceive the idea of measuring his statements about reality by what of reality reveals itself to him. Man does not possess any unassailable truths, but he stands-unassailably-in a truth relationship that produces the play of concealment and disclosure, emergence and disappearance, Being-there and Being-away. Heidegger finds the shortest expression for this understanding of truth in the Greek term aletheia, literally unconcealment. Truth has been wrested from concealment, either as a result of the revealing or emergence of something that exists, or as a result of its being brought out, unveiled. In either case it is a kind of struggle being waged” (Safranski 1998:217-219).

Safranski, Rüdiger
1998[1994] Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil. Ewald Osers, trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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A Genuine Conversation

18/01/2011 By Kelly Cooper

“On Gadamer’s account, a genuine conversation is one in which each partner to the conversation is concerned entirely with the subject-matter (die Sache) and with arriving at the truth with regard to it. In the first instance, this presupposes what Gadamer refers to as the docta ignorantia. Genuine conversation is based upon a recognition of our own fallibility, on a recognition that we are finite and historical creatures and thus we do not have absolute knowledge in Hegel’s sense. The knowledge we do have is akin to that of Socrates: a knowledge that we do not know and hence an openness to the possible truth of other views. In the second instance, then, each participant in a genuine conversation must be concerned with discovering the real strength of every other participant’s position. The participants cannot try simply to out-argue or outwit each other; neither can they try to reduce the views of others to the conditions of their genesis. At issue is not the intention behind a person’s saying what the person says but its possible truth. Each participant must thus be taken seriously as an equal dialogue partner, as someone who despite heritage, quirks of expression or the like is equally capable of illuminating the subject-matter. As Gadamer writes:

Thus, it is part of any genuine conversation that one submits to the other, allows his viewpoint really to count and gets inside of the other far enough to understand not him, to be sure, as this individuality but rather what he says. That which has to be grasped is the substantive validity of his opinion so that we can be united with one another on the subject-matter.

Gadamer’s reference to a unity on the subject-matter here is important. The unity with which he is concerned is not the result either of one partner’s imposing his or her views on another or of one partner’s simple acquiescence to the views of another. Rather, if individuals or groups come sincerely to a shared understanding of a subject-matter, the understanding they share is not the original property of one or the other but represents a new understanding of the subject-matter at issues. Gadamer’s model here is that of a Socratic dialogue in which the position to which Socrates and his interlocutors come at the end represents a significant advance over the position each maintained at the beginning. Each begins with certain views and assumptions but in confronting opposing views and assumptions has to reconsider and develop his or her own. The process, then, is one of integration and appropriation. This does not mean either that the participants give up their positions or that they use those of others imply to buttress their own. Rather it means that each participant takes account of the other opinions, attempts to show what is wrong and right with them as well as with his or her own position and thereby formulates, in concert with the others, a view that each recognizes to be closer to the truth than any of the original positions. As Gadamer writes:

Coming to an understanding in conversation presupposes that the partners are ready for it and that they try to allow for the validity of what is alien and contrary to themselves. If this happens on a reciprocal basis and each of the partners, while holding to his own ground simultaneously weighs the counter-arguments, they can ultimately achieve a common language and a common judgment in an imperceptible and non-arbitrary transfer of viewpoints. (We call this an exchange of opinions).

And even more forcefully:

What steps out in its truth is the Logos, which is neither mine nor yours and which therefore so far supersedes the subjective opinions of the discussion partners that even the leader of the discussion always remains the ignorant one.

The successful conclusion of a dialogue thus reflects a shared understanding and one that, moreover, reflects a transformation of the initial positions of all discussion partners. Gadamer argues that the same kind of shared understanding and transformation also marks the successful conclusion of the hermeneutic dialogue with aspects of one’s own or another tradition” (Warnke 1987:100-101).

Warnke, Georgia
1987 Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition and Reason. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

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