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The Enigma of Art in the Thought of Martin Heidegger

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The Enigma of Art in the Thought of Martin Heidegger The Enigma of Art in the Thought of Martin Heidegger Russell Davies Goldsmiths College, University of London Thesis submitted for the degree of: Doctor of Philosophy July 2011 Declaration I declare that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Russell Davies Date 2 Abstract In crucial places in his path of thought, Martin Heidegger appeals to the notion of an insoluble enigma as a way of elucidating that thought, to such an extent that the enigma goes to the very heart of that thinking. All the words that are central to that thinking, the words that Heidegger uses to point towards the possibility of appearance and disclosure, are marked by this figure of the insoluble enigma. Whether writing about the opening of a world that art is, or the happening that is figured as Ereignis , Heidegger resorts to the enigma to illuminate his thinking. But what does it mean to inscribe an enigmatic insolubility into one’s very thinking and what kind of explanatory power can such a figure have? To answer these questions, this thesis traces the thought of the enigma through a series of readings of Heidegger’s ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, his 1942 lectures on Hölderlin’s ‘The Ister’ and Sophocles’s Antigone , and his writings on the poem of Parmenides. Beginning with a consideration of the enigma of art, it moves on to the enigmatic activity of the river in Hölderlin’s poem and how this gives rise to the enigma of the here and now, before moving on to the enigma of the uncanny in Antigone and the law of becoming homely in being unhomely; the place of the law itself becomes critical here. Finally, via Parmenides’s saying that thinking and being are the same, the enigma is identified with Heidegger’s rethinking of the ancient Greek thought of a0lh/qeia and traced, from there, to the givenness of being as es gibt and Ereignis . 3 Contents Acknowledgements page 5 Introduction On the enigma in thought 6 Chapter 1 To see the enigma 36 Chapter 2 The enigma of the river 77 Chapter 3 The enigma of Antigone 123 Chapter 4 The enigma of Parmenides 174 Epilogue A time and place for us 229 Bibliography 237 4 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Alexander García Düttmann, for his help and guidance in the production of this thesis, Brendan Prendeville and Howard Caygill who read part of the thesis for my transfer to MPhil to PhD, and Daniele de Rugo for help with some of the ancient Greek. My greatest thanks go to my wife Shiona for all her love and support while I was working on this thesis. 5 Introduction On the enigma in thought The figure of the enigma, the Rätsel , is one that ramifies and reverberates through a number of texts by Martin Heidegger without becoming an explicit theme therein. Apart from two paragraphs largely concerned with the etymology of Rätsel in his lectures on Hölderlin’s poem ‘The Ister’, Heidegger neither gives us a definition of the enigma, nor does he elucidate it in a structured way. It is given to us in all its enigmatic character. Why does Heidegger resort to the enigma throughout his work? From ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ to his essays on the Presocratics, the figure of the enigma is referred to in its essential insolubility. In the essay, ‘Hegel and the Greeks’, originally given as a lecture in 1958 and published in 1960, he writes of the enigma of a0lh/qeia , the Greek term usually translated as truth, and how it has prevailed or been at work [ walten ] both in the beginning of Greek philosophy and throughout the course of philosophy. Attending to the enigma, Heidegger says, is a form of pointing out that the philosophy of the Greeks exists in thinking in terms of a not yet [ noch nicht ] of what is still to be thought, what Heidegger calls the unthought, to which we have yet to measure up. To think the enigma attentively in Heidegger’s terms would seem to suggest that we can begin to measure up to the unthought. In a footnote to the word Rätsel , added in 1960, Heidegger writes of ‘the authority [ Befugnis ] of the enigma’. 1 It seems that being attentive to the enigma of a0lh/qeia is to submit oneself to the authority of the enigma and to put oneself in the position of the not-yet of thinking. The enigma seems to name this not-yet but what is this authority, how does it arise and who or what authorises it? Does the enigma claim this authority from out of itself for itself? Whatever the answer to these questions, it seems reasonable to say that the enigma has a certain privilege within Heidegger’s thought, whether he characterises it as the enigma of a0lh/qeia , being or art. What it means to inscribe such a figure in philosophy and where it takes us are, perhaps, the guiding questions that lead this thesis as it follows the ravelling and unravelling of the enigma in Heidegger’s thought. But should it concern us at all? To 1 Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks , edited by William McNeill, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p.336. Wegmarken , Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1976, p.444. 6 say that something is an enigma could mean that we need trouble ourselves no further with it; surely, we know what an enigma is without really having to think about it. Nothing could be more straightforward than the meaning of an enigma, especially if we consult the dictionary. An enigma is a puzzle, a riddle, something ambiguous or mysterious, whose meaning can be figured out, or whose ambiguity can be demarcated and domesticated. But if there is one thing that Heidegger teaches us, it is, perhaps, that a resort to the dictionary tells us nothing essential. If we rely solely on the dictionary, perhaps we miss what is essential about the enigma, or we mistakenly assume that we know what an enigma is and therefore leave it behind, untroubled and untroubling. That there is something troubling and troubled about an enigma, however, seems to be a recurrent theme in philosophy and this trouble is signalled in one of the beginnings of Western thought, in Greek tragedy, in Sophocles’s drama Oedipus Tyrannus . Oedipus’s response to the enigmatic Sphinx, a hybrid creature from Theban legend, firstly in freeing Thebes from her malignity and secondly in his ignoring of her injunction not to seek out the murderer of Laius, brings about his and his family’s downfall. At the time of the murder, the Sphinx had counselled the people of Thebes not to bring his killer to justice, as Creon advises Oedipus during the play, after he has told him about the killing. This injunction is echoed by Tiresias in his confrontation with Oedipus who, having decided that the murderer must be found and punished, forces Tiresias to share his knowledge of the murder. Oedipus had been crowned king of Thebes, having solved the enigma of the Sphinx’s riddle, thereby saving the city from her tyranny. In marrying Jocasta, he fulfils the second part of the Oracle of Apollo, having already fulfilled the first by killing his father Laius in ignorance of who he was. What brings about his downfall is not the actual killing of Laius but Oedipus’s absolute insistence on knowing who the murderer is. It is this insistence on pursuing to the end what he does not know is self-knowledge that destroys him, leaving him abject. In ‘Notes on the Oedipus ’, Hölderlin writes of a knowledge drunk on its own magnificent and harmonious form which ‘provokes itself to know more than it can bear or grasp’; 2 Oedipus has one eye too many, as he 2 Friedrich Hölderlin, Essays and Letters , edited and translated by Jeremy Adler and Charlie Louth, London, Penguin Books, 2009, p.320. Werke und Briefe, Band 2 , herausgegeben von Friedrich Beißner und Jochen Schmidt, Frankfurt am Main, Insel Verlag, 1969, p.732. 7 writes ‘In lovely blueness’. This exposure of the truth about Oedipus takes the form of a series of interrogations which, says John Jones, ‘have a sublime impersonal malignity such as a series of forced moves at chess would impart if the game possessed tragic relevance to life’. 3 These interrogations lead to a self-judgement in which there is a dual self-loss, writes Christoph Menke. Oedipus establishes his own condemned status, which he has ‘imposed on himself, without, however, intending it. In his self-condemnation Oedipus immediately twice loses himself; for this reason he is – in as well as after his self-condemnation - a self no longer capable of self- determination, of action and living – he is one accursed’. 4 What the fate of Oedipus seems to teach us is that how one responds to an enigma can bring with it an overwhelming responsibility and that what seems to be a plausible answer might well be nothing of the sort. The Chorus enjoins us at the end of the play to look upon the disaster that has befallen the ill-starred Oedipus, ‘who knew the answer to the famous riddle [ a0ini/gmat0] and was a mighty man, on whose fortune every one among the citizens used to look with envy!’. 5 The Greek Sphinx had a monstrous reputation even before her troubled meeting with Oedipus – all who failed to answer the riddle were killed; are these the corpses that populate the foreground of Gustave Doré’s painting L’Enigme ? – so the outcome for Oedipus only added to this monstrosity, even though the Sphinx was seemingly defeated.
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