Swarnika Ahuja
Professor Saitya Brata Das
ES472E: Aesthetic Theories
30th October 2017
‘Clearing-away’:
Thinking about Art, Space and Dwelling in Heidegger
In his ‘ Die Kunst und der Raum’ , translated as ‘Art and Space’, and published in 1969, Martin Heidegger turned to the question of art, spatiality and a much neglected category of aesthetic theory, that of, sculpture. He begins a through and radical way of thinking about what renders space its special character in the first place. Which then becomes necessary to study and extremely important to understand his conception of the work of art itself. This line of thought is indeed at the heart of Heideggerian philosophy revolving centrally on the nature of Being, dwelling, and existence itself.
Sculpture teaches us what it means to be in the world. When Heidegger turns to sculpture in the later part of his career—first somewhat tangentially in the early 1950s, then directly and in express collaboration with the sculptors themselves in the mid- to late 1960s—the encounter leads him to a rethinking of body, space, and the relation between these. A starker conception of corporeality emerges in these works, entailing a new conception of space as well. In fact, part of what is so tantalizing in these sculptural essays is the articulation of this re-construed relationship between body and space, no longer one of the present body occupying empty space but something more participatory, collaborative, mediated, and welcoming. Bodies move past themselves, entering a space that is always receiving them to communicate and commingle in the physicality of the world[…] Heidegger’s sculptural reflections are born out of a rethinking of limit whereby, in keeping with a favoured expression of Heidegger’s, the limit marks the beginning of a thing, not its end. Things begin at their limits for it is here that they enter into relationships with the rest of the world.
-from Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space and the Art of Dwelling
Thus, in thinking about art and space, we are also in the realm of Things, of attempting to understand the true nature of existence itself. The Thing occupies a central concept in Heidegger’s own thought. In conceptualising space, space for art and spacing, clearing-away, can we really begin to think about how Holderin’s true poetic man dwells ‘ poetically.’
We will return to these issues in the course of this paper but for now it is crucial to understand that
space in Heidegger is a complicated issue, one that attracts a deep thinking about the nature of inhabiting and dwelling in the world itself.
". . . poetically man dwells . . ." If need be, we can imagine that poets do on occasion dwell poetically. But how is "man"—and this, means every man and all the time—supposed to dwell poetically? Does not all dwelling remain incompatible with the poetic? Our dwelling is harassed by the housing shortage. Even if that were not so, our dwelling today is harassed by work, made insecure by the hunt for gain and success, bewitched by the entertainment and recreation industry.
-From, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought
In turning is his attention to the phrase ‘poetically man dwelling’, Heidegger sets aside a unique problem in the articulation of this very phrase. He identifies the modern world to be so full of distractions, idle chatter, ruled by the violent logic of homogenising the particularity of being- that it becomes impossible to think of dwelling as at all compatible with the poetic, the artistic. In talking about how the advent of modernity has reduced existence into mindless idleness he looks at space in terms of conjusted urbanscapes marked by the base ruthless logic of capitalism and usurped by mass-produced entertainment which is what is ultimately passed off as ‘art’ in a consumerist society.
However, he does not stop here and probes this question further to assess whether the idea of dwelling and art can come together.
But before we so bluntly pronounce dwelling and poetry incompatible, it may be well to attend soberly to the poet's statement. It speaks of man's dwelling. It does not describe today's dwelling conditions. Above all, it does not assert that to dwell means to occupy a house, a dwelling place. Nor does it say that the poetic exhausts itself in an unreal play of poetic imagination. What thoughtful man, therefore, would presume to declare, unhesitatingly and from a somewhat dubious elevation, that dwelling and the poetic are incompatible? Perhaps the two can bear with each other. This is not all. Perhaps one even bears the other in such a way that dwelling rests on the poetic. If this is indeed what we suppose, then we are required to think of dwelling and poetry in terms of their essential nature.
-From, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought
By thinking of the nature of what it means to dwell, outside its instrumental and functional meaning , he opens up the idea of dwelling, inhabiting for a possible meaning to come, which is unique and poetic.
We travel, and dwell now here, now there. Dwelling so understood is always merely the occupying of a lodging. When Holderlin speaks of dwelling, he has /before his eyes the basic character of human existence. He sees the "poetic," moreover, by way of its relation to this dwelling, thus understood essentially. This does not mean, though, that the poetic is merely an ornament and bonus added to dwelling. Nor does the poetic character of dwelling mean merely that the poetic turns up in some way or other in all dwelling. Rather, the phrase "poetically man dwells" says: poetry first causes dwelling to be dwelling. Poetry is what really lets us dwell.
-From, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought
Thus it is the space of art, the realm of poetry that lets a special kind of dwelling to take place. He will further, define, poetry as a special kind of art that allows for a kind of measuring, transforming the idea of man dwelling on earth into something more essentially tragic., something can only come into being in the ground of poetry, a possibility that arrives when poetry performs a kind of clearing-away for artistic man to dwell.
Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building. Thus we confront a double demand: for one thing, we are to think of what is called man's existence by way of the nature of dwelling; for another, we are to think of the nature of poetry as a letting-dwell, as a—perhaps even the distinctive kind of building[…]The more poetic a poet is—the freer (that is, the more open and ready for the unforeseen) his saying—the greater is the purity with which he submits what he says to an ever more painstaking listening […]According to Holderlin's words, man spans the dimension by measuring himself against the heavenly. Man does not undertake this spanning just now and then; rather, man is man at all only in such spanning. This is why he can indeed block this spanning, trim it, and disfigure it, but he can never evade it. Man, as man, has always measured himself with and against something heavenly. Lucifer, too, is descended from heaven. Therefore we read in the next lines (28 to 29): "Man measures himself against the godhead." The godhead is the "measure" with which man measures out his dwelling, his stay on the earth beneath the sky. Only insofar as man takes the measure of his dwelling in this way is he able to be commensurately with his nature. Man's dwelling depends on an upward-looking measure taking of the dimension, in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth.
-From, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought
He defines poetry as fundamentally a kind of measuring, the only kind of measuring that allows man to dwell at all. In a sense, Heidegger conceives poetry and art as that dimension that can letting-dwell man at all.
The taking of measure is what is poetic in dwelling. Poetry is a measuring. But what is it to measure? If poetry is to be understood as measuring, then obviously we may not subsume it under just any idea of measuring and measure.
Poetry is presumably a high and special kind of measuring. But there is more. Perhaps we have to pronounce the sentence, "Poetry is a measuring" with a different stress. "Poetry is a measuring." In poetry there takes place what all measuring is in the ground of its being. Hence it is necessary to pay heed to the basic act of measuring. That consists in man's first of all taking the measure which then is applied in every measuring act. In poetry the taking of measure occurs. To write poetry is measure-taking, understood in the strict sense of the word, by which man first receives the measure for the breadth of his being. Man exists as a mortal. He is called mortal because he can die. To be able to die means: to be capable of death as death. Only man dies—and indeed continually, so long as he stays on this earth, so long as he dwells. His dwelling, however, rests in the poetic.
-From, ‘…Poetically Man Dwells…’, Poetry, Language, Thought
And, this, is what I argue makes this space of dwelling poetically truly tragic in all its dimensions. From what he articulates about Holderlin’s poetry, we can extrapolate an understanding of the tragic nature of existence of man itself which is allowed to span out, be dwelt upon only through art.
By this, I do not contend that all art is tragic but rather all art has the capacity to dwell upon the tragic nature of existence. To further explain this notion of how art and poetry clears-away the space ‘with which man measures out his dwelling, his stay on the earth beneath the sky’ that depends ‘on an upward-looking measure-taking of the dimension, in which the sky belongs just as much as the earth; I would be referring to the German artist Casper David Friedrich’s painting of The Monk by the Sea (1808-10). To illustrate and etch out this tragic dimension of art as a measure taken in clearing-away the space for man to dwell poetically.
The Monk by the Sea. Friedrich, Caspar David. c.1808-10
In the above painting Friedrich literalises this metaphor of man measuring himself against something heavenly- ‘The godhead is the "measure" with which man measures out his dwelling, his stay on the earth beneath the sky
The paradox of tragic flaw plays itself out visually for what is ultimately painting is space itself. Friedrich paints the lone figure of the monk teetering at the edge of an unimaginably vast and incomprehensible void. The gap between the monk and the object of his gaze that seems to lie almost outside the frame acts like a metaphor for the vast sum of knowledge about our own existence that humans desire to understand.
Friedrich’s monk appears to be almost doomed to gaze upwards for he fixes the action of the painting in a moment of endless continuity. Painted deterministically, the head of the monk can only tilt upwards and wonder at all that lies beyond. His state of despair and anguish thus becomes necessarily logical and ironically natural. Induced as the logical outcome of wilfully gazing into the abyss wanting to bridge that gap and yet fated to be frozen, trapped by circumstance forever and denied that very knowledge that he seeks to gain. A knowledge that he cannot help but desire to gain, emanating from a fault of his own and yet not quite his own. That is what makes his dwelling in this space necessarily tragic for it is deterministic for ‘man is man at all only in such spanning. This is why he can indeed block this spanning, trim it, and disfigure it, but he can never evade it’. The title of the painting is very important in this regard. It is the ‘monk’ placed ‘by the sea’. Almost to suggest that he is at the limit of something. Limit is very crucial in Heidegger’s philosophy. For it is in all things broken that he places the nature of existence itself which is revealed in the moment of near annihilation.
Therefore, he calls man is man only in such a kind of spanning, because this wide space, this clearing-away which is revealed in all its openness is what it truly means to dwell poetically. It is only when man dwells at the limit of his existence, his gaze tragically turned upwards, that the special nature of his existence is revealed.
He highlights at least three such limits (1) The narrow strip of beach creates a compressed foreground-Friedrich wants us to feel the particularity and locatedness of personal experience both spatially ( feel your heavy feet sinking into this particular sand) and temporally (watch as these seemingly deep footprints disappear, as they have all those who walked here before) (2) The edge of the water marks another such limit : from our position on this side of that boundary , we are confronted with the vast expanses of se and sky that humans can manage and traverse only in limited ways and only with great difficulty. These realms that extend indefinitely ‘beyond’ this shoreline our nameable and imaginable, even if only from afar or in abstract ideas, but Friedrich wants to illicit an acknowledgment that the reality of these creaturely realms always exceeds and outstrips our capacities for action, perception and understanding . (3) Friedrich is ultimately interested, however, in marking a limit that is ‘impenetrable’: one in which the “Beyond” is Unspeakable, and Unthinkable, an infinite and uncreated No-thing. In The Monk by the Sea this limit is most profoundly marked not by the shoreline or the expanses of sea or sky but by the horizon from which these realms appear and toward which they recede. The very possibility of the horizon signifies the beginning and the end of perception (and cognition), beyond which we can only gesture “in faith” toward that which is invisible, unpronounceable and unthinkable-‘a holy conjecture’.
-from Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism
There is a brokenness of being that cannot be evaded, while standing at the limit of the shoreline, the limit of language, where language itself breaks, that is poetry, or at the limit of one’s own existence and in the face of the void of death. This is what Heidegger means when he expounds on the phrase ‘poetically man dwells’. For only to be at this limit of one’s own existence, can one truly be-come oneself.
But how, exactly, does truth happen in the artwork? How does the artwork set truth to work in the work? The work, Heidegger tells us,“is” or unfolds to the extent that, “installing [aufstellend] the world and bringing-forth [herstellend] the earth,” it releases their essential strife, accomplishes it. It is therefore the specific double operation of “setting up” (Aufstellen) a world and “setting forth” (Herstellen) the earth that characterizes the work. It is through this twofold operation that the work brings truth to stand in the work. Allow me to follow Heidegger’s complex and subtle analysis as economically as possible. The setting up of world is not to be understood here in the ordinary (German and English) sense of placing, as when a work is placed in a collection or at an exhibition. The setting up that is in question here is rather an erecting (erstellen), a bringing to stand (errichten), as in the case of a building (a church, a temple) or even a poem, a tragedy, for example, that one would present (darstellen) at a festival. In all such cases, the work itself sets up, opens up something that is not reducible to the purely material aspect of the work: the building, the work commemorates, dedicates, consecrates, or simply presents. It gives something to see.
-from ‘Art: Sister of Philosophy?’, Thinking with Heidegger: displacements
However, what is shown, revealed at the end of this ‘strife’ this ‘struggle’ this ‘process’ of ‘clearing-away’ is not known to us and rendered impenetrable.
We dwell in the world, the world is all around us, yet precisely to that extent the world is never present to us as such. In the work, the world itself comes to be gathered, and our experience of it is precisely the experience of this gathering, as when, faced with an ancient Greek temple, we cannot help notice the way in which the Greek world, a world made of mortals and gods, unfolding between sky and earth, between the political community and wild nature, comes together in the temple. In the temple, the world is allowed to world, it is brought to presence without being represented. Room is made, a space is freed for the unfolding of the world, and for its peculiar spaciousness which we, as beings-in-the-world, inhabit. And yet, while allowing the world to unfold and to deploy its own spatiality, while providing a place for the Open, the work also provides a place for that which resists being drawn into the Open, for that which, by its very nature, withdraws in the very drawing forth of the world. […]For the work is indeed made of something: stone, steel, words, color, etc. But, contrary to what happens in the production of equipment, in which the material is used up, disappearing into the very function of the product, into its serviceability and usability, the artwork is such as to allow the very material of which it is made, and into which it sets itself back, to come forth and shine as such.
-from ‘Art: Sister of Philosophy?’, Thinking with Heidegger: displacements
Therefore, the special nature of the work of art is such that is always original, always comes into being as if for the first time, always uttered anew.
To be sure, the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, but he does not use it up. Similarly, the painter uses paint, but in such a way that color is not merely used up in the process. On the contrary: in the artwork, stone, colors are made to shine forth, and this shining forth is the very shining of earth itself. In and through the work, our belonging to earth is at once remembered and affirmed. But this belonging to earth is precisely the belonging to that which, from within the world, resists the logic of world, namely, the logic of disclosure and accessibility, of availability and appropriation. Whenever we turn to earth in an attempt to grasp it, as if it were a part of the world, it withdraws as earth. Such is the paradox of earth, that it can be broken open only by being lost. The work of art alone retains earth as the impenetrable, unbreakable.
-from ‘Art: Sister of Philosophy?’, Thinking with Heidegger: displacements
This is what makes art absolutely singular. It escapes the homogenising logic of the universal and is freed, burst open – defined by its particularity of being. Precisely because it cannot be ever completely available for appropriation. It lies beyond, at the limit of any such understanding or grasp-ability.
This is what renders Art it is spectral nature. It dwells always at the moment of grasping this full knowledge, of acquiring the truth of its existence, of gaining the remaining meaning that is invisible, the remnant of what escapes full perception. And yet this full understanding is what is deferred. Something always remains outside that never fully explains, never makes the truth of its existence ready for easy and mass- consumption. And yet, in the present absence of this complete Truth, art clears-away the space to be-come itself. For art is art only when it cannot be fully appropriated, co-opted by the violence of the logic of the Universal and is able to become something beyond its mere instrumental , materialistic, object-like existence. And that is the paradox at the heart of this ‘clearing –away’. Art is able to reveal the truth of its existence precisely by withraring, concealing this full knowledge of itself to the other.
Let us try to listen to language. Whereof does it speak in the word ‘space’? Clearing-away (Raumen) is uttered therein. This means: to clear out (roden), to free from wilderness. Clearing-away brings forth the free, the openness for man's settling and dwelling. When thought in its own special character, clearing-away is the release of places toward which the fate of dwelling man turns in the preserve of the home or in the brokenness of homelessness or in complete indifference to the two. Clearing-away is release of the places at which a god appears, the places from which the gods have disappeared, the places at which the appearance of the godly tarries long. In each case, clearing-away brings forth locality preparing for dwelling. Secular spaces are always the privation of often very remote sacred spaces.
Clearing-away is release of places.
In clearing-away a happening at once speaks and conceals itself
In clearing-away a happening at once speaks and conceals itself. […]The interplay of art and space would have to be thought from out o the experience of place and region. Art as sculpture: no occupying of space. Sculpture would not deal with space. Sculpture would be the embodiment of places. Places, in preserving and opening a region, hold something free gathered around them which grants the tarrying of things under consideration and a dwelling for man in the midst of things. If it stands thus, what becomes of the volume of the sculptured, place embodying structures ? Presumably, volume will no longer demarcate spaces from one another, in which surfaces surround an inner opposed to an outer. What is named by the word "volume," the meaning of which is only as old as modern technological natural science, would have to lose its name.
The place seeking and place forming characteristics of sculptured embodiment would first remain nameless.
-from ‘Art and Space’
Therefore, the vast expanse painted of The Monk by the Sea is not emptiness. That which poetry becomes a measuring of- is not empty. There is always something, rather than nothing. Heidegger propounds on this very idea as,
And what would become of the emptiness of space? Often enough it appears to be a deficiency. Emptiness is held then to be a failure to fill up a cavity or gap. Yet presumably the emptiness is closely allied to the special character of place, and therefore no failure, but a bringing-forth. Again, language can give us a hint. In the verb "to empty" (leeren) the word "collecting" (Lesen), taken in the original sense of the gathering which reigns in place, is spoken. To empty a glass means: To gather the glass, as that which can contain something, into its having been freed.
To empty the collected fruit in a basket means: To prepare for them this place.
Emptiness is not nothing. It is also no deficiency.
-from ‘Art and Space’
Therefore, what Art embodies is this constant process of opening up, of worlding in the world, where space is defined as always a poetic dwell-ing clearing-away marked by the spectre of the invisible. In The Monk by the Sea, the Monk is therefore always haunted by the prospect of the coming of the Messiah, the coming of what he seeks, what he desires the complete knowledge of.
And yet it never comes. It remains outside the scope of the painting, of human and artistic knowledge, the vast expanse it portrays.
It hovers like a spectre before the eyes of the Monk who waits hopefully and despairingly.
The poet, the artist, the philosopher who is always attuned to receiving this complete knowledge, and yet is always tragically, melancholically open to that which will never manifest itself. This is what renders Art its beauty, where the truth of it nature lies, that which Goethe formulated as,
"It is not always necessary that what is true embody itself; it is already enough if spiritually it hovers about and evokes harmony, if it floats through the air like the solemn and friendly sound of a bell."
Bibliography
Mitchell, Andrew J. Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2010. Print.
Heidegger, Martin, and Albert Hofstadter. Poetry, Language, Thought. New York: Perennial Library, 1975. Print.
Jonathan A. Anderson. Modern Art and the Life of a Culture: The Religious Impulses of Modernism (Studies in Theology and the Arts) IVP Academic , 2016. Print
Miguel de Beistegui.Thinking with Heidegger: displacements(Studies in Continental thought) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Print
Martin Heidegger. ‘Art and Space’ translated by Charles H. Seibert. Loras Col