From Nietzsche's Artist to Heidegger's World

Man and World 22:3-23 (1989) �9 Academic Publishers

From Nietzsche's artist to Heidegger's world: The post-aesthetic perspective

BABETTE E. BABICH

Department of Philosophy, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023

1. Introduction

According to its modern conception, the aesthetic domain is delimited by its inherent autonomy. Accordingly, the aesthetic may be demar- cated from the technical, the scientific, the workings of finance, the long-term political, and so on. The latter are practical concerns of the real but not the aesthetic world. Violating this institution, Nietzsche's and Heidegger's artistic philosophies construe art from the perspectives of life and truth rather than in the typical aesthetic categories of beauty, meaningful form, or value. So distinguished, I propose to review their philosophic writings on art as "post-aesthetic".

For a post-aesthetic philosophy of art, the distinction between art and non-art cannot hold. The modern account o f the work of art as an objective, aesthetic achievement, i.e., liable to classification, evaluation, or other analysis, is refused as a sterile definition of art, serving as the foundation of traditional, impotent aesthetics. Beyond traditional aesthetic distinctions, the post-aesthetic perspective valorises neither the subjective (intention or conception) nor the objective (experiential or referential) dimensions of art.1

For Nietzsche, the possibility o f aesthetic evaluation permits a transformative justification of life. Heidegger, reflecting on the work of art, offers a foundational hermeneutic of the essence of art as the happening - the event or occasion - of truth. I shall show that the meaning of Heidegger's 'artistic' truth assumes the truth o f art from the vantage of Nietzsche's interpretive perspective: "We have art lest we perish o f the truth. ''~

Recent commentators offer compelling analyses of Nietzsche's

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artistic perspective, addressing life on the model of literature and inventive mythologising? While subscribing to the basic value of these readings, I hold that rigorous at tention to Nietzsche's own concern with hierarchies and values in ' truly' artistic life demands further re- finement. As a creative philosophy or artist's aesthetic, 4 Nietzsche's philosophy looks to the individual life of power and its ascendent, sovereign expression.

From the outset, the perspective I construe as post-aesthetic in Nietzsche is not concerned with the general range of aesthetic experience. Regarding artistic creation or expression from an artistic perspective, Nietzsche objectly concinnates the dynamic of life-expression in what he calls the grand style. In this, a canon for post-aesthetic evaluation may be found: where everything is to be regarded as art, everything may then be distinguished as art according to its particular genealogy, s

2. Nietzsche

I have suggested that Nietzsche's philosophy of creative art expresses a post-traditional aesthetics because the subject o f the work of art - whether defined by the role o f reception or invention - is not the defining feature of artistic achievement. The modern subject is de- centered. For Nietzsche, moreover, the focus of creation is not the artist's public; neither is the genius of the artist relevant, except where the artist is seen as a work o f art. At the height of self-cultivation, at the height of cultic release, the artist is "no longer an artist, he has become a work of art. ''6 Nietzsehe's philosophy of creative art, then, is literally an aesthetic of the artist.

Nietzsche's post-aesthetic viewpoint articulates the phenomenology of the creative experience. For Nietzsche, of course, such a phenomenology requires a genealogical analysis. Hence, the origin of the creative moment reflects the character of the outcome. Nietzsche writes: "I ask in every instance, 'is it hunger or superabundance that has here become creative?'" (GS:370). Not the artist's intention, but the poetry of-the artistic impulse (Diehtung) is to be illuminated by this question. Where everything has the character o f art, the objective work of art as well as the achievement of a living moment 7 of human style reflects its original indigence or superabundance.

In what Nietzsche describes as the creative impulse of hunger, i.e., when it is neediness that gives rise to art, artistic invention calculates and answers weakness. Consequently, in the recollection of necessity, both art and science share a common root as inventive compensations. In other words, because, using Nietzsche's language, all t ruth is the contextual adumbration of communi ty or individual perspectives - interpretation - both (reactive) art and (indigent) science advance the conservation of life in the face of its horror and its dangers. Expanding the significance of Nietzsche's original insight noted above: we have art and science lest we perish of the t ruth that is life.

Championing art is not to oppose art to science because truth's annihilating threat is prior to both as well as because, for Nietzsche, scientific truth is itself artful. In other words, the truth of science offers only a simplification, artificialisation, of existence: "only we have created the world that concerns u s " : From this perspective, any distinctions between art and science are matters of style, not truth and lie.

In the perspectival play of style, when it is superabundance that gives rise to art, only the internal dynamic of expression compels creative achievement. Because creative expression is also the "desire for destruction" (GS:370), the articulation of abundance does not preserve the ideal of life, while for its contrasting part, the impulse of lack seeks to secure life's preservation. In the magnanimity of expressed power, the moment of life is immortalised - "prompted by gratitude and love" (ibid.). The conflicting dif ference between immortalisation and preservation is signally counter-intuitive and will be explained below.

Nietzsche's highly stylised philosophic project, as the endeavor "to look at science in the perspective o f the artist, but at art in that o f life, ''9 is itself post-aesthetically conceived. Interested in the post- aesthetic, we may ask how art is to be interpreted 'in the light of life'? In The Birth o f Tragedy, Nietzsche expresses the world-artist in Scho- penhauerian terms, as i f nature worked its creative, demi-urgic way through human beings. The concept of a world-artist is avowedly metaphysical, recalling Hegel's Absolute as much as Schopenhauer's Wille. But an hermeneutic reading of the Nietzschean project demands that a distinction be made between Nietzsche and Hegel, or Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. 1~ We are not permitted to simply discard the idea of the "world-artist" or the phenomenon of nature as offering the poten-

tial for the achievement of art. But we need to find a way of reading this apart from the Hegelian or Schopenhauerian project. A third metaphysical approach is suggestive. Connected with both Romantic and Enlightenment traditions, Friedrich yon Schiller is accorded an explicit and approbative reference in The Birth of Tragedy. Because of his positive exposition of Kant's Critique of Judgment, Schiller, moreover, offers an ideal counter-balance to the unsympathetic reading of Kant lent Nietzsche by Schopenhauer.

For Schiller, human freedom consists in making humanity, i.e., crafting humanity, as a work of art. Inspired by Kant's emphasis on the intersubjective value of the aesthetic judgment in the harmonious play between sensuousness and reason, I~ Schiller underlines the oppositional element intrinsic to aesthetic achievement, "man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being, and he is only fully a human being when he plays. ''a2 For Schiller, the enjoyment of beauty is agonistic proof of "the practicability of the infinite being realized in the finite. ''a3 The self-creation of man is given in creative sensitivity. If self-creation for Schiller is properly and conservatively limited to self-cultivation, F.W.V. Schelling explicitly coordinates the productive power of nature with that of art and, in this continuum, Hegel finds art sublated by Spirit. If the rigor of responsible interpretation is to guide us, we may not speak of a will nor indeed of spirit realising itself in art in Nietzsche's thought. But we may speak of the consummation of nature in natural gifts, in all the romantic resonance of genius revealed in the potency of human nature in the transformation of its own potential being, now rendered as work of art. TM Despite these resonant commonalities, Nietzsche remains, unlike Schiller and unlike Schelling or Hegel, resolutely anti,metaphysical. In a Nachlass note Nietzsche writes

...metaphysics, religion, morality, science - all of them are only products of [the] will to art, to lie, to flight from 'truth', to nega- tion of 'truth'. (WP:853: 1)

This anti-metaphysical emphasis includes science as a "prejudice in favour of reason [which] compels us to posit unity, identity, duration, substance, cause, individuality, being. ''is This prejudicing error, or will 'to lie', is incorrigible, for there "would be no life at all if not on the basis of perspective evaluations and appearances. ''16 The truth

beyond this error, as we have seen, is not the t ruth of another world but the t ruth of life. The truth of life, for human beings, is historical, which is to say that the t ruth o f life is life's intercalation with limita- tion and death. For Nietzsche, like W. Benjamin, art is " the redemption of the men o f knowledge ... who see the terrifying and questionable character o f existence" (WP:853), i.e., its necessary inadequacy and ultimate impossibility. By 'looking at art in the light of life', then, Nietzsche means to underscore the work of art as lying, as illusion.

In the work of art (as in science), we do not have something actual. 17 Instead, art reveals what is as possibility. Interpreted as potential, possibility is likewise revealed in the perception of nature. The experience of the sublime is the experience of the richness of possibility. And this possibility is inherently ambivalent. Indeed, for a post-idealis- tic Nietzsche, natural possibility is the gaping awfulness of what cannot be, crippled by what has been, balanced on the edge of what can be. 18 It is worth repeating that Nietzsche is unconcerned with the work o f art, or with the fulfillment of nature as such, or with the recognition of the possible (including possible events) in nature. Yet it is essential to discuss possibility because Nietzsche is absorbed by the achievement of human being as art-work. Reminiscent of Schiller's poetic perspective, Nietzsche introduces the human possibility-as-work-of-art, as giving style to one's character. ~9 The stylistic emphasis - referring to the possibility of life in the grand style - that, for Nietzsche, is the redemptive project of art.

Style reflects the canonic distinction between works of art as creative achievements. Art, as we have seen for Nietzsche, arises from two sources: "The full and bestowing as opposed to the seeking, desiring" (WP:843). Only one is properly creative while, engendered by lack, the other is the invention of deficiency. For this reason I have argued else- where that within Nietzsche's horizon, the arts in the ordinary sense must be included with religion and science as inventions of need. 2~ Manifesting a referential dependence upon productive society, 21 both art and science work to conceal or overcome a lack. In an historic and social context, this lack is productive desire, the desire to control. Nietzsche conceives this dominating drive for power as reactive Will to Power, here seen to be the will to the secure acquisition of power.

Beyond the absorbedly reactive, the first-named source of creativity is active, invoking the sheer wealth of abundance, or overflowing power. From this origin, creation is pure expression at the cost of

calculation. But as self-overcoming without reserve on the side of expression, creative artistry entails the ultimate possibility of self-extinc- tion. 22

The self-destructive significance of giving style to one's character through the agency of what Nietzsche calls creative, active art is the exposition of power in the force of abundance, superfluity, or excess. To understand the value of the creative difference between action and reaction, let us return the question to the Will to Power, as it repeats the same distinction.

Where the Will to Power does not fail to be over-arching, unreserved self-expression, we may see the grandeur of style in active or creative Will to Power. But such a creative Will to Power requires the cultivation of unusual and vulnerable potential. Hence the creative Will to Power is terminally rare - and ordinarily difficult to understand. Inviting annihilation without rancor, without perversity but in all good will, the "highest state o f affirmation o f existence is conceived from which the highest degree of pain cannot be excluded: the tragic-Dionysian state" (WP:853). Yet, the death of tragedy as a cultural art form and the birth and aesthetic ascendance of logic and technological control testifies to the implausibility of this affirmation for ordinary, rational society.

Ordinarily, then, in the sphere of everyday rationality, where the Will to Power fails to be the articulation of primordial power, it is none- theless articulated from a position of weakness. Ordinary Will to Power, finding itself lacking and seeking to garner more power for itself, as desire and need for power, is inherently reactive. The Nietzschean ex- cavation of the genealogy of reactive Will to Power is at once subtle and strikingly counter-intuitive. And it must be said that the intuitive automatically commands complicity, while, seldom encountered, the counter-intuitive elicits unthinking refusal.

Now what is intuitively obvious is what we call 'traditional'. And traditionally, the Nietzschean Will to Power is only partially delineated as the expression of a will seeking to win power. Intuitively, or automatically, to think of the Will is to conceive a drive. In the same intuition, Will to Power is a drive for power. Thus, traditional Will to Power is determined in a negative or deficit economy of compensation, toward the end of acquisition but not expenditure. Beyond this limited definition, Nietzsche explains such a dynamic of power acquisition in genealogical terms, as reactive (traditional) Will to Power. Reactively, the

drive for power is expressed from an original lack as resentment in the productive mechanic of acquisition. But the genealogy of power demands fuller expression for Nietzsche: resentment, or ressentiment, is not the sole articulative possibility of the Will to Power.

Lack of power, ordinarily constitutive of dynamic systems, can be itself lacking. When the system overflows with power, the descriptive image of a lack is inadequate. Instead Nietzsche observes, "A living thing desires above all to vent its strength. ''23 In this desire to express power, we may now understand the natural impulse of enhanced power proper to the Will to Power. After all, it is only in expression that power is felt as power and not as its tack. The core of Nietzsche's life-aesthetic is found in this felt-expression of power: "whenever man ... rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power" (WP:853).

Countering ordinary intuition, this life-aesthetic preponderates a creative or expressive manifestation of the Will to Power. The increase (Steigerung) felt in the expression of power is the heightening of the feeling of power. This is not an objective or control-oriented experience but precisely an intensification of the feeling of power corresponding to what Nietzsche calls "Rausch" or intoxication.

Negatively, the intensified feeling of power is not epitomised by a performance automobile as such. Rather the "rush" of enhanced power is derived from its expression. The feeling of power is in dis- charging the engine's capacity. The idea of expressed power is plainly more than metaphorical. The consumption of energetic reserves ex- hausts the engine.

It is this irrecusable eapacitative discharge which inspires the fear of loss characterising the conservative power-ethos of reactive or traditional Will to Power. For Jean Baudrillard, analysing the post-modern transition from dramatic alienation to ecstatic communication, "it's all over with speed - I drive more and consume less. No more expenditure, consumption, performance, but instead regulation, well-tem- pered functionality. ''24 This redounds to the indigent condition of creative inspiration, when it opposes the expressive significance of power for sole sake of exhibition (or the grandeur of style). Conser- vation of power is concerned with the reservation, harnessing, and budgeting of power. To calculate the expression of power measures its limits, articulating the reserves of power to be won and lost against its expression. This acquisitive ideal has become actual in Western science. The ordinary project of technological world-intervention/

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invention represented in the overcoming of obstacles or limitations manifests the t r iumph of self-preservation against that of artistic self-overcoming. But this must mean, for Nietzsche, that the motor of scientific culture is fundamentally reactive.

Artistically, the question of science, together with the question of morality and the question of culture in general, is relevant. For Niet- zsche is not merely concerned with the artistic community: artist, art purveyor, art consumer, art critic, art historian, or even, the art work itself. He is concerned with aesthetic expression, i.e., life in the grand style. To the extent that this interest corresponds to human creativity, we are speaking of art, and so of aesthetics. Yet we exceed the merely (ordinarily or traditionally) aesthetic domain of human life to the extent that Nietzsche intends to conceive existence as art by regarding the human being as work of art. For Nietzsche, "art is essentially affirmation, blessing, deification of existence" (WP:8, 21). Schiller's once limited romantic vision is transmogrified: "man becomes the transfigurer of existence when he learns to transfigure himself" (WP: 820). This transfiguration is more than finding art in the everyday; it is a transvaluative vision of life. This transvaluative vision can be taken as, say, A. Nehamas does, in the sense of its broad applicability to human life, justifying existence for a newly nostalgic culture. 2s

Note, however, that to follow Nehamas in his good-natured reading of life as self-composed, self-designated literature, embracing anyone's potential invention, ignores the project of the Nietzsche whose concern with the small, the last, and even the highest man was dedicated to distinguishing, selecting, and emphasising the value of the post-human: the "Ubermensch". Attending to Nietzsche's selective philosophy of the creative, post-human artist, we may not overlook the affirmative nihilism or tragic dimension of the grand style.

To be true to Nietzsche's style, the affirmation of life requires an affirmation of destruction in life. Presaging Heidegger's authentic resolve, the resolution of life as mortals live it in the valuation of life dynamised by amor fati anticipates the death of life. The recognition of death in life, i.e., the ascendance of non-being solicited from the position of finite being, speaks beyond the disappointments we name post-modern, post-art, post-scientistic, post-religious, or post-progres- sive. 26 Because the achievement of the tragic-Dionysian perspective exceeds the reative temper of disappointment it is more than the post- modernity of a nostalgic vision. For where the ideal of modernity shat-

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ters the illusions of tradition, advancing the vision of perpetual progress, it turns upon itself, as Nietzsche predicted, like a snake biting its tail. Modernity's ideal still promised is nevertheless eclipsed. The so- cietal ethos of desiring production sustains the illusion of progress. But deferring ultimate consummation, the ideal of progress is resorbed in the image of infinite extension and temporal satisfaction becomes the stopgap of impossible desire. Because of the perpetuity of the promise of progress, the various responses to post-modern culture have preserved the ideal of modernity in its erasure. Although I cannot here detail this point further, let me point out, for example, that the disappointment invoking the past and its tradition must remain victim to any resurrection of the modern point of view as it is conceived under the original sign of modernity. And again, the ascetic sophistication that takes the vulnerability of modernity in stride is duplicitous. One forsakes the metaphysical denomination of ultimate certitude in order to preserve the claim to its proximate value.

If post-modernism is ambivalent, how much more so is the emphasis on the post-human in Nietzsche which shifts the modern subject to the sliding or precessionally de-centered subject of interpretive style. It does not so much remain to ask but to underscore the question, how much of what we value in 'modern life' is to be sacrificed with the subject of modernity? Questioning Nietzsche's emphases as we must, we may not forget that he focusses upon the rare (noble) possibility of being that is more than traditionally or socially or even historically human. Nietzsche's project is to defend the societally, and perhaps psychically endangered, post-human against the threat of modernity: the image of the democratic collectivity of free and equally respected individuals. Never modern life, then, but rather the tragic in life is to be justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.

3. Heidegger

Like Nietzsche, Heidegger is not concerned with the artist. Nor is he concerned except mediately with the work of art. Because Heidegger questions the nature of art, one must differentiate between traditional aesthetic understanding (of art and non-art) and Heidegger's refusal of the aesthetic delimitation of art. This difference is evident in Heideg- ger's focus on the "thingly character" of art. 27

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For Heidegger, to express the thingly character of the thing it is necessary to let the thing be what it is and this in order to reflect the work of art. 2s Heidegger's investigation analyses a pair of shoes, represented in a painting by Van Gogh. This investigation is particularly pertinent for the painting, which Heidegger simply describes as well known, is now notorious through M. Schapiro's criticism of Heideg- ger's recognition of the peasant woman's shoes as an identificational error. This mistake is illuminating for its philosophic unimportance. As an art-historian, Schapiro tells us that the shoes belonged to Van Gogh himself. This revelation does not alter the value of Heidegger's analysis. For even without a reflection on Van Gogh's painting, or if, in fact, Heidegger had recognized the putatively "true" owner of the painted shoes, the culminating point of his essay would remain un- changed. Equipment "belongs to the earth and it is protected in the w o r l d " (p. 34). That point is developed from the world of the wearer, not the name or even the specific character of the wearer's world. The question has to do with the world for the wearer of shoes, bearer of temple gifts, witness to art's truth.

In essence, then, Heidegger's considerations hold because their value is not in matching an original wearer to the shoe: this foundation is n o t the "origin" of the work of art. Heidegger's reflections may only be adjudged in light of the meaning he gives the matter of earth and world in understanding the thingly character of the thing towards an expression of art as setting a world into truth, articulating the opening of a human world from the closure of the earth.

For Heidegger, Van Gogh's painting speaks of the equipmental character or truth of shoes. Because of this revelation, my approach to" Heidegger's project entails Schapiro's criticism: the painting does not identify the shoes with their proper owner. Heidegger's error, or anyone else's error, prohibits this interpretation of the painting as a work of art. 29 The origin of the work of art is n o t the painter's model. That the equipmental matter of fact of the shoes shown in Van Gogh's painting is not a pair of peasant shoes tells us nothing about what a pair of shoes shows itself to be in truth. Truth, for Heidegger, as it is at work in the work, "is the disclosure of what the equipment ... is

..." (p. 36). Together with the question of Being, the question of truth unfolds

Heidegger's "aesthetic" vision. Beyond traditional aesthetics, in place of beauty, the truth of the work of art is "the displacement of a par-

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ticular being in its being, the happening of truth" (p. 38). This disclosure of the truth of art exceeds traditional aesthetics for the sake of thinking, reflecting the historical building of the world? ~ Heideg- ger's aesthetic advance, his post-aesthetic approach to the question of the work of art, claims the challenge of opening vision "to the fact that what is workly in the work, equipmental in equipment, and thingly in the thing comes closer to us only when we think the Being of beings" (p. 39). Anticipating the possibility of this recognition, we find ourselves in the domain of Heidegger's own question.

Art is a "happening of truth at work" (p. 41). To explain this happening, Heidegger considers happening as such. From this, the reader is brought to see that the happening of truth is not a representation, nor is it an expression of anything. Recalling the emergent power of nature, Heidegger offers the architectural illustration of the temple- work which "opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back again on earth" (p. 42).

With the articulation of world and earth in the temple, we are re- ferred to aesthetics proper, taken as a phenomenological expression. In its consecration, invoking the holy in the open presence of the god, the place of the temple blesses and grounds the living earth. Re-tracing the project of this opening not only suggests the aesthetic, revelatory power of the work but presages the historical possibility of desecra- tion or artistic impotence or refusal:

The temple, in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on themselves. This view remains open as long as the work is a work, as long as the god has not fled from it. (P. 43)

In the "look" of things given by the temple-wrok, we have the aesthetic revelation. Opening up the senses, the aesthetic-epistemic ontology of the work of art sets up the truth of a world on earth. As Heidegger renders this aesthetico-noematic epiphany hermeneutically, he empha- sises the power of this opening as illuminating the truth of being. This illumination is not an encounter, or an isolated life-experience. To set up the truth of a world is to reveal its historical character as an expression of physis. Truth of this kind is of a world shot through with earthly historicity: it comes to birth, grows, and dies. For mortals, the invo- cation of the gods has a fortune, both triumphant and dark.

To say, then, that the work of art sets up a world is to say that the

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work of art sets the world enduringly (but not perpetually) in force: "The work moves the earth itself into the Open of the world and keeps it there. The work lets the earth be an earth" (p. 46). Note that just as Heidegger's earlier interpretation of the equipmental character of shoes did not correspond to the original model for the shoes painted in a painting by Van Gogh, this passage does not respond to the 'world' of influence that we might name the local 'genius' of the still-preserved site of a Greek temple. In speaking of earth, Heidegger is drawing our attention to the revealing power of the work of art. The work of art is more telling than the logic of scientific analysis or colloquial intuition. For art reveals where science cannot. Thus Nietzsche proposed to look at science in the light of art and not the other way around.

Heidegger, too, repudiates the ultimacy of science. But because the scientific perspective serves a legitimating function in the modern, re- flective tradition, his challenge is perforce illegitimate. The matter of science is the facts. And facts are material, measureable, and in sum, analysable. For Heidegger, however, this means that such facts have nothing to with the earth and its earthing. The duration of the earth is to be understood as physis, unfolding. In its self-revealing, the "earth is essentially self-secluding" (p. 47). The calculated record of scientific analysis cannot penetrate this contradictory interplay of self-revelation/ self-seclusion? 1 Where the geochemist or mason fails, the sculptor can succeed. Against the violating techniques of scientific analysis, the sculptor preserves the integrity of earth in the stone: "To be sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it ... But he does not use it up" (p. 47).

This preservational insight is capital. The stone shines as stone in the statue, as the earth of the work revealing the world. But earth is not put in reserve or left unused in the art work: the sculptor does not save on material. If the sculptor does not "use up" the stone of earth, the earth is still put to use. This using or working of earth in the sculpture preserves without reservation. Because the earth of the art work does not remain in stock for further disposal, the work of art preserves the earth as earth. Hence, as it belongs to the earth, the temple stone strivers to conceal the world opened in the temple-work. "The world grounds itself on the earth, and the earth juts through the world" (p. 49). The strife of earth and world is the working of the work which sets truth to work.

For Heidegger, notoriously, truth is unconcealment. Let me suggest that this not be heard as a revelatory dynamic of phallogocentric discovery. Truth for Heidegger is not a matter of getting at what things

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'really' are: "Truth is un-truth, insofar as there belongs to it the reser- voir of the not-yet-uncovered, the uncovered, in the sense of conceal- men t " (p. 60). Here, "denial in the manner of concealment belongs to unconcealedness as a clearing" (p. 55). By recalling truth as aletheia, Heidegger suggests that what is revealed as true, what is unconcealed, must emerge out-of-concealedness. This reference is more than historical. Because what is in t ruth is shown forth from out o f Being, that is, in the clearing that grants "to us humans a passage to those beings that we ourselves are not, and access to the being that we ourselves are" (p. 53), concealment permeates the same "sphere of what is lighted." Every unconcealment, we recall, is equi-primordially a concealment. This is the circumstance of oblique perception and dissemblance. What is more, the "clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment" (p. 53). In truth's illumination, then, the summer's nests are revealed when autumn strips the concealing leaves. But what is shown in the clean outline of the naked branch retains its secret. This is not only because the nest no longer enfolds t he nestling: what opens the nest for our discovery is occluded in the moment of opening? 2 For Heidegger, "The nature of truth is, in itself, the primal conflict in which that open center is won within which what is stands and from which it sets itself back into itself" (p. 55). Hence, when the retired soldier pays public respect to the body of a former national leader, what is seen at a once-envied proximity is not even the shell it is named to be. The revelation due importunate interest inevitably conceals. Understood now as a4etheia, this mortal truth is the event of the art work? 3

Heidegger now returns to his two illustrations, disclaiming their particularity and claiming what is revealed beyond them:

Truth happens in the temple's standing where it is . . . . Truth happens in Van Gogh's painting. This does not mean that something is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equipmental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole - world and earth in their counterplay - attains to unconcealedness. (P. 56)

The work of art builds a world in truth. "Truth happens only by establishing itself in the conflict and sphere opened up by truth itself" (p. 61). The work e-ventuates truth in the rift or abyssal edge of the struggle between world and earth. This abyssal edge is the figure of the

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work: Ge-stell. The world is made out, thrown forth in the shape of the work, and the same figuring preserves the earth borne as earth, restrained in its self-seclusion, "in the fixing in place o f t ruth in the figure" (p. 64).

At the beginning of this section, it was observed that the t ruth of art counts as phenomenological and as (post-)aesthetic because the work of art shows what is most surely as it is. "Art is the setting-into- work o f t ru th" (p. 77). The truth of what is is that it is. But this 'that it is', for Heidegger, is an ordinary recognition - we can note it o f everything present to us: "what is more commonplace than this, that a being is? In a work, by contrast, this fact, that it is as a work, is just what is unusual" (p. 65).

Departing from the usual aesthetic vision of the art work, Heidegger is concerned with the dynamic of the work: "Art is the becoming and happening o f truth" (p. 71). From the start, this dynamic involves more than the artistic achievement of the work of art on the part of the artist. A world is set up, earth is set forth. The phenomenological hermeneutic looks to the creators of the work of art only to note that "what is created cannot come into being without those who preserve it" (p. 66). Without such preservers, without those capable in Nietzschean terms of a response "to the truth happening in the work" (p. 67), the work of art does not work its truth but is abandoned to exile. Yet bereft of preservation, even where a world cannot be sus- tained, the earthly thing of the art work remains.

Evidently, desolation is a kind of preservation. But it fails to let the work be for letting be is a special compor tment that awaits knowing resolve: "Preserving the work, as knowing, is a sober standing-within the extraordinary awesomeness of the truth that is happening in the work" (p. 67 -68) . Perhaps it should be said tha t when Heidegger speaks of preservers he is not looking to the solicitude o f curatorial conservation.

Instead, Heidegger seeks to encourage the rare daring of those capable of bold reflection. Thinkers, poets, artists of the word, or of life - in Nietzsche's post-human sense - such, for Heidegger, are capable of reflection in the shadow of the modern world: "Reflection transports the man of the future into that 'between' in which he belongs to Being and yet remains a stranger amid that which is. ''34 This kind of bold reflection remains rare for reasons Nietzsche anguishedly traces in the expressive denial intrinsic to self-preservation.. Self-ex-

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pressive venturesomeness risks the artist of life; the most extravagant life-artist is consummately vulnerable. For Heidegger, too, this vulnerable daring which articulates the challenge of questioning reflection is unutterably rare, where it "is not necessary for all, nor is it to be accomplished or even found bearable by everyone. ''3s

Beyond the tradition of aesthetics stands the radical suggestiveness of the world-artistry proper to Heidegger. In this radicality, there can be no criterion for a "work of art" because there is no need to find a criterion that distinguishes a work of art from other things. Only the discipline of a connoisseurship needs a principle of demarcation. But what the connoisseur really wants is never the preservation of aletheic truth. Instead, the connoisseur desires the precision of aesthetic value. For Schapiro's exigent expertise as we have seen it, this yields a cor- respondence between a painter's model and the painting of the model. Or else, the origin of the work of art might be found between the painter's vision and the painting, between the vision of the painting and the painting as object for public appreciation, or artistic colloquy. This dynamic coordination is proper to art criticism, to art history, and so to aesthetics.

But Heidegger offers and demands much more. For Heidegger, what is revealed in the work of art is the founding of truth. The truth that happens in art inspires history. Building a world, art transforms the world. For Heidegger, as for Hegel, "Whenever art happens - that is, whenever there is a beginning - a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again" (p. 77). Because art originates in this way, art is the origin of the work of art, " that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers" (p. 78). We need Nietzsche's artistic aesthetic to understand an art that is actively creative in this way because ordinary (i.e., reactive) concepts o f aesthetics will not do.

In our own time, we ask whether art still works as a beginning? 36 Borrowing Hegel's own conceptual necessity, Heidegger proposes, "perhaps experience is the element in which art dies" (p. 79). Heideg- ger in questioning the aesthetic element of the death of art, challenges the creative possibility of art today. This is the question, as O. PiSggeler suggests, "of the possibilities o f art in an age of technology. ''37

Nietzsche has shown us that the conflict between creativity and death is life. Heidegger has suggested that the life of art is the happening of truth. Truth attends in the death of art. If Heidegger does not affirm the death of art in the age of technology (or the world-picture o f

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science), he may be seen to suggest, invoking Hegel, that the happening of truth is past.

We can understand this passing if we recall that in our own time, to have value, the work of art must be true. That is, for modern tastes, art is to embody, represent, or otherwise symbolise truth. Yet, like the logical truth of science, the aesthetic truth of modernity is not the aletheic occasioning of truth, which Heidegger names the origin of the work of art. The modern tradition determining true art is concerned with authenticity, taken with regard to authority, accurate representation and the proper reception of aesthetic value-attributions. Proving this scholarly precision one is more than able to recognize Van Gogh's shoes as such, or to descry the name of the painter of Rembrandt's Man With the GoMen Helmet. 38

But these exacting achievements of modern aesthetics are unimpor- tant for those concerned with the founding .of truth in art (Dichtung). The accomplishment or mastery of the art-work eclipses factitious de- tails. Hence Heidegger can write, "Who the author is remains unim- portant ... the poem can deny the poet's person and name. ''39 The founding of truth in art is not a technical determination, but an event, an occurrence. And the lived, historic occasion of the work, "the being of truth in the work and as work" (p. 81), builds a world. This world is not merely the poet's but abides in force for all with (Nietzschean) "ears to hear."

Although our Western world has been the happening of this truth, the origin of the work of art, the poetic essence of truth, or language, is not to be thought, except as it is eclipsed, in the darkness of the modern world. For Heidegger, this circumstance is particularly damning for the institution of the world of the art-work. As we ordinarily take truth on the part of logic, 4~ so the reality of the world is taken in its scientific and technological/productive objectivity, as the reality of daily experience. Hence today's world is set up by the technologico- scientific object rather than the art work. 41 In the rule of accuracy and discrimination, the current domain of experience is adumbrated by the truth of science not art. 4~ This is the pathos of our time, its despera- tion, if one likes. But the rule of science is not the tragedy of our time. For the tragic requires a sense of groundlessness, and science is the con- victed search for the ultimate ground of things - the still-surviving vision of the metaphysical tradition. There is nothing tragic, no touch of twilight apprehension in science.

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Heidegger describes the experiential shift from the foundational truth of art to the epistemological t ruth of scientific technicity:

In place of all the world-content of things that was formerly per- ceived and used to grant freely of itself, the object-character of technological dominion spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely. 43

For Heidegger this shift deflects art because it refuses the figure, the figural, the figurative in favour of " the project of the merely calculated product" (p. 127). If the life o f the grand style may be redefined in Heidegger's terms as the at tuned solicitude of reflection, then Niet- zsche's life of expressive power may be recognized as the artistic re- sponsiveness of poetic thinking, which hearkens to the call of Being, spoken in stillness. In its poetic office, thought limns what is not / cannot be said. 44 Hence, the event or appropriation of truth in the poetic word retains the ineffability or essential evanescence of aletheic truth.

Poetry has the special significance it has for Heidegger because its t ruth is inherently, mortally vulnerable:

The will to originality, rigor and measure in words is ... no mere aesthetic pleasantry; it is the work that goes on in the essential nucleus of Dasein as historical. 4s

The Dichtung that is art in search of co-respondents, is the task of reticent poetic institution: "anticipation in reserve". 46 This is an active opening or letting be - Gelassenheit. But the exhortation, 'Let be - ' is not the end. If the essence of poetry is the finitude of thinking, there can be no last word. We have, however, seen enough to offer the part- ing suggestion that the embodiment of resolute releasement is antici- pated in Nietzsche's figure o f the post-human: exceeding rare, articulating power and artistic joy, the chiaroscuro of mortal being blessing existence.

Notes

1. There is a recent tradition of artists and writers in our industrial to scientific

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to technological to technopolistic age, speaking to this anti-aesthetic refusal. I refer to the work of Duchamp, Batailte, Beckett in part, Dali in part, perhaps, indeed, every artist of kitsch and avant-garde in the age of photography and cinema (after W. Benjamin). But the artists themselves are necessarily ambivalent. Essentially counterweights, the traditional artist (even of post- modernism), is always simultaneously absorbed by the opposed cultural aesthetic insofar as its approbation (critical, economic, and historical) is desired.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann & R.J. Holling- dale (New York: Vintage, 1968), [section] 822. Hereafter cited as (WP:section number) in text.

3. For example, A. Nehamas, Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1985) and A. Megill, Prophets o f Extremity: Nietzsche, Heideg- ger, Foucault, Derrida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

4. As we shall see below, the notion of an artist's aesthetic includes the notion of a post-aesthetics.

5. For Nietzsche, art can be engendered by either need or excess. In the full expression of over-abundant power, the expression of life is a manifestation of style, an intensified exhibition of power. From an original lack, the invention of art principally seeks to preserve or increase power.

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth o f Tragedy, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), section 1, p. 37.

7. "To 'give style' to one's character - a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye." Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 290, p. 232.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vin- tage, 1974), section 301. Hereafter (GS:section number) in text.

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, p. 19. The original mandate for this orientation may be said to have been provided by Kant, and is further developed in Schiller, Sehopenhauer, and Schelling. In philosophic aesthetics, B. Croce and R. Collingwood represent this trend, and A. Hofstadter's Art and Truth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), shows a contempo- rary expression of this correlation, responding to Heidegger's reading of science and technology.

10. In other words, a rigorously Nietzschean hermeneutic of the notion of a "world-artist" seeks an interpretation germane both to the whole of Niet- zsche's philosophic project and the scope of the work where it first appears.

11. Cf. Immanuel Kant, The Critique o f Judgment, trans. J.C. Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), sec. 9.

12. Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, in a Series of Letters, ed. and trans. E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1967), 15th letter.

13. Ibid., 25th letter. 14. "man becomes the transfigurer of existence when he learns to transfigure

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himself," Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power 820, p. 434. 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight o f the Idols, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Harmonds-

worth: Penguin, 1968), p. 37. 16. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (Har-

mondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 34 p. 47. 17. "Higher than actuality stands possibility", Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,

trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 63. Here, Heidegger uses a Nietzschean flourish to advance his own conception of phenomenological hermeneutics beyond Husserl.

18. This will be recalled as anxiety or the crisis of the abyss in Heidegger. 19. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 290. 20. Towards a Perspectival Aesthetics o f Truth: Nietzsehe, Philosophy, and Science

(forthcoming). With regard to this association, Nietzsche comments, "that is an objection to 'today', not to artists." WP 812, p. 430.

21. Cf. Jean-Francois Lyotard's emphasis on productivity ,in The Post-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

22. In opposition to the ultimate expression of power, self-preservative overcoming makes self-overcoming superfluous.

23. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 13, p. 26. 24. Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication", pp. 126-134 in Hal

Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Post-Modern Culture (Bay Press: Port Townesend, 1983), p. 127.

25. This nostalgic longing characterises certain philosophic interpretations of post-modernism. See, for example, David Kolb, Pure Modernity: Hegel, Heideg- ger and After (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1986).

26. Because the aesthetic of the tragic Dionysian perspective exceeds such disappointments, denominations of this kind defer the experiential or lived effort of questioning. Hence, as both Jameson and Lyotard affirm, post- modern perspectives are often no more than sophisticated positions advocating the old goals of modernism. Apologies for the presumption of modern knowledge, like the chastened reservations of scientists or philosophers of science, present the claim to truth without presuming upon its finished form. Diminish- ing the ideal of progress preserves the high modern image of progress in the sophisticated advantage of the post-modern.

27. Clearly, this focus on the thing is not to be approached as we ordinarily understand thing.

28. Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971). Further citations in the text will be followed by page numbers in parentheses. Heideg- ger explains that we must "leave the thing to rest in its own self, for its time, in its own being" (p. 31).

29. In fact, Heidegger's later precision shows him to be in no need of careful re- interpretation on the matter of ownership. Schapiro's point is not Heidegger's point. Heidegger disclaims the opinion that "this painting by Van Gogh depicts a pair of actually existing peasant shoes, and is a work of art because it does so

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successfully" (p. 37). It is Heidegger's emphasis in his subsequent text that it most compelling, as we see below.

30. On the other hand, the traditional aesthetic interpretation of the work of art is misleading. For Heidegger, the "way in which aesthetics views the art work from the outset is dominated by the traditional interpretation of all beings" (p. 39). Note that this charge is not specific to the tradition of aesthetics because it addresses tradition as such.

31. "Earth thus shatters every attempt to penetrate into it. It causes every merely calculating importunity upon it to turn into a destruction. This destruction may herald itself under the appearance of mastery and of progress in the form of the technical-scientific objectiviation of nature, but this mastery remains an impotence of will" (p. 47).

32. In what reveals itself there is an equi-primordial moment of self-seclusion; what grants in the happening, withdraws.

33. "Setting up a world and setting forth the earth, the work is the fighting of the battle in which the unconcealedness of being as a whole, or truth, is won" (p. 55).

34. Martin Heidegger, "The Age of the World Picture," in The Question Concern- ing Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 136.

35. Heidegger, "Age of the World Picture: Appendix," p. 137. 36. Heidegger asks, "is art still an essential and necessary way in which that truth

happens which is decisive for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character�89 "The Origin of the Work of Art", p. 78.

37. O. PSggler, "Heidegger Today," The Southern Journal of Philosophy 8 (1970):305. [E. Ballard & C. Scott, eds., Martin Heidegger in Europe and A.merica (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), p. 33.]

38. Indeed, beyond the art-historical analysis of the objective inspiration of the work of art, the traditional question asks about the objective quality of the work, that is, about the distinctive properties of the work of art. Modern approaches pose the theoretical question of aesthetic value and associated criteria: of things shown in galleries, in museums, in student shows, or on side- walks: hence we ask today, which works are art, which not-art, which great- art? For those who need to distinguish art from other things, all are important questions.

39. Martin Heidegger, "Language," in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 135. 40. Cf. Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," p. 36. 41. Cf. PSggeler's assessment, explicating both the philosophic import (beyond

aesthetics) of Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art," as well as Introduc- tion to Metaphysics, that, "It is not a people, but totalitarianism, not the great creative geniuses but functionaries of totalitarianism, not a work but a mechanization, which are characteristic of our time" in "Heidegger Today," pp. 304-5 [p. 32].

42. This truth excludes the truth of the art-work explained by PSggeler "as that event of truth which in temples, tragedies and hymns binds together the divini- ties and mortals, the openness of horizons or and the self-closure of earth

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vis-k-vis the world as 'four-fold polyvalence'." In "Heidegger Today," p. 305 [p. 33].

43. Martin Heidegger, "What Are Poets For?" in Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 114.

44. I thank William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963) for rendering this formulation insightful and, like the book, enduringly fruitful.

45. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche I, trans. D. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 145.

46. Heidegger, "Language," p. 310.

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From Nietzsche's Artist to Heidegger's World