L’absente de tous bouquets
Linguistic Negativity in Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty ———————————————————— Berndt Sellheim B.A. Comm. (Hons 1 st Class, UTS), Dip. App. Sci. (Nuc. Med., Sydney). ———————————————————— Macquarie University, Department of Philosophy, Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy, April 2008. This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
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2 Contents Foreword 13 Prelude 19 Introduction 23 Chapter 1 Romantic Origins 31 Chapter 2 Poetic Revelation in German Romanticism 45 Chapter 3 Negative Foundations in Martin Heidegger 71 Chapter 4 Heidegger and Poetic Revelation—Artwork, 119 Thought and Word Chapter 5 Merleau-Ponty: Silence and Être Sauvage 163 Chapter 6 Merleau-Ponty and the Silence of Nature 203 Chapter 7 The Poetic: Confluence of Word and Flesh 247 Bibliography 289
3 4 L’absente de tous bouquets ———————
Linguistic Negativity in Martin Heidegger
and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Synopsis
What is our opening upon the world? What is the relationship between this
opening—its tactility, depth and reach—and the language with which we seek to
express it? Poetry and philosophy are frequently considered in opposition, but here,
pushing up against the limits and possibilities of expression, in the face of ‘raw’
perception, they speak of a common opening upon experience. Both disciplines
begin in a sense of wonder that we find ourselves in a meaningful world, and each
takes the exploration of that ‘meaning’ to be the first question of existence. Their
divergence, and the manifold paths that proliferate within each individual discipline,
arrives in how this question is unfolded and engaged.
Although the opposition between the disciplines is an ancient one, one that
continues to this day, some theorists do attempt to merge these genres, and in fact
see the possibilities of exploring this phenomenological opening as existing only
within the coupling of the two. This thesis will look at how such a coupling is
theorised in Jena Romanticism, and examine the way in which it is formulated and
executed in two of the 20 th Century’s most original and important thinkers, Martin
Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The central question is why, in the
responses offered by both these philosophers, modes of ‘indirect’ expression are
frequently privileged over more ‘direct’ logico-discursive language. The inquiry
will be engaged thematically and in the linguistic form of the work itself.
5 Statement of Candidate I declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my
knowledge contains no material previously published or written by
another person, nor material which has been accepted for the award of
any other degree or diploma at Macquarie University or any other
educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in
the thesis.
The intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work,
except to the extent that criticism and advice from others concerning the
overall structure and design, presentation and linguistic expression is
acknowledged.
Berndt Sellheim
6 Abbreviations for Frequently Cited Texts Martin Heidegger BDT. ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking.’ Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York, Perennial Classics, 2001. BT. Being and Time trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1962. CCP. ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’ in Discourse on Thinking trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freud. New York, Harper Perennial, 1966. CTP. Contributions to Philosophy: (From Enowning) trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999. DL. ‘A Dialogue on Language’ in On The Way to Language. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. EoP. ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. I. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996. LH. ‘The Letter on Humanism’ in Basic Writings ed. David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 2002. LP. ‘Language in the Poem’ in On The Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. OWA. ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. NL. ‘The Nature of Language’ in On The Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. RP. ‘Remembrance of the Poet’ trans. Douglas Scott in Existence and Being . Chicago, Gateway, 1968. PR. The Principle of Reason. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996. QCT. ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993.
7 WCT. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York, Harper Collins/Perennial, 2004. WM. What is Metaphysics’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. WPF. ‘What are Poets For’ in Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstandter. New York, Perennial Classics, 2001. WTL. ‘The Way to Language’ in On The Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. Maurice Merleau-Ponty EM. ‘Eye and Mind’ in Galen A. Johnson ed. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting , trans. ed. Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1993. N. Nature. Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2003. PhP. Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith. London, Routledge, 2002. viii. PS. ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs , trans. Richard C. Mcleary. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. SB. The Structure of Behaviour , trans. Alden L. Fisher. London, Methuen, 1965. UP. ‘An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work’ trans. Arleen B. Dallery in The Primacy of Perception . Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964.
8 Miscellaneous and Secondary Literature NH. Miguel de Beistegui, The New Heidegger. London, Continuum, New York, 2005. CJ. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment , trans. J.H.Bernard. Mineola. Dover Publications, 2005. LA. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1988. HLP. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. HPA. —— Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.
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There are all kinds of emptiness and fullness
that sing and do not sing.
Robert Hass
11 12 Foreword
The thesis began in a particular ‘sense of world’ that arises when we engage with the natural environment, and a curiosity with how it might be articulated. What it has become is a sustained and in some respects open inquiry into the nature of language and its ‘fit’ with that world. The way this question is framed is via the relationship between poetic language and philosophy, and the directionality of the question will most frequently be from the philosophical into the poetic.
Some practical matters need to be clarified at the outset. The first is what I mean by the poem, or poetry, or the poetic, a notion that will be used frequently. Besides a few provisos, I don’t find any contradiction in saying that my definition here is essentially a circular one: most of us have experiences of poetry, of reading poems or having them read to us, and have subsequently developed a ‘sense of the poetic.’ This definition is not much help in any absolute sense, but for the majority of readers it will function well enough. 1 Significant differences appear within changing poetic history, ‘school’ and genre, but it is arguable that even between the sonnet and free verse, between Homer and
Robert Perelman, a certain relationship arises between the poetic object and language which asks similar questions of sound, meaning, and form, which enquires about the link between sense, music and word. The poem is an aesthetic enaction of these questions.
From Page 11. Robert Hass, Sun Under Wood. Hopewell, The Ecco Press, 1996. 21. Wherever translations are my own, I have included the original text in the notes. 1 Derrida in fact suggests is that there is no theory of aesthetics the foundation of which is not in some way embedded within its own aesthetic objects, adding “Circles of circles, circle in the encircled circle.” Jacques Derrida, ‘Parergon’ in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1987. 24. 13 This said, when I talk of ‘poetry,’ it is especially in the direction of modern poetry that
I am gesturing. Modern poetry (for the sake of convenience) is anything beginning with
Mallarmé. At the same time as recognising the arbitrary nature of this definition, the significance of Mallarmé’s break from poetic history, and his emphasis on a very precise and profound negativity, make him hard to ignore as a point of epochal commencement.
Still, a discussion which focuses on the American tradition might well draw the line at
Walt Whitman, which is to say, really, that such distinctions are arbitrary, but remain somewhat useful and not altogether meaningless. In particular I choose Mallarmé because the central theme of this thesis is linguistic negativity, and Mallarmé was both the mother and midwife of a certain form of negativity that is now commonplace within poetic expression.
The idea that certain linguistic structures are not reducible to a logico-discursive language, yet remain meaningful, is central to the following discussion, and it is this particularly that is understood by the term ‘linguistic negativity.’ Such negativity may take the form of unresolved or polysemous language within a poem, or a philosophical text which trades on an apparent ‘imprecision.’ Negative meaning indicates that which cannot be understood in a positive sense: a word (or a phrase or an entire text) that exhibits a problematic reference to its usual object or action, where ‘direct’ lines of signification are severed, where literal meanings perhaps do not function at all, do not, as such, ‘make sense.’
Frequently, such ‘negative’ relationships counter-determine the usual modes of understanding. In this breakdown of sense, alternative possibilities of meaning arise, yet within this space of destabilised signification, such meanings evade determinate translation, representation, or reduction into a more ‘rigorous’ language. They remain negative, and yet they continue to signify. Such expressive negativity might be
14 understood in terms of an ‘indirect disclosure’: what meaning it does present, it offers indirectly. The idea which necessitates such indirection is that some phenomena defy direct representation, yet at the same time might still be revealed through obscure or oblique references, partial sketches of their overall form. Such a model is central to
German Romanticism and I will consider its emergence and development in the first two chapters.
In chapters 3 and 4, I will examine what I term ‘existential negativity’ in relation to
Martin Heidegger: this describes the way in which the experience of existence is permeated by forms of absence. A further sense in which negativity is understood is as an indication of an underlying ontological absence, which marks the two-fold play of revelation and concealment by which Heidegger conceives of Being revealing itself. I will term this ‘ontological negativity.’ These two chapters will explore the relation between these ‘Heideggerian negativities’ and the issue of ‘negative’ expression.
Differently nuanced, negativity also refers to a fecund conception of silence: a birth of meaning within the world that, in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking, continues to exist within expression. An exploration of Merleau-Pontian ‘silence’ will be the focus of chapters 5 and 6. In this case, I am describing a meaning structure that is prior to language, an innate expressivity of the world itself, with which language continues to speak. The link between such a silence and spoken or written expression is a question that I will push up against frequently.
By labelling these diverse phenomena instances of ‘negativity,’ I do not mean to collapse the differences between them, but to emphasise the way in which they intersect and share common points of origin; that one necessitates the other. What exactly
Mallarmé, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and German Romanticism have in common is to be found here, within a theory of expression which sees the non-explicit aspects of language
15 as being in some respects equal to those which might be grounded within a logico- discursive communication, and in some respects capable of more.
It should be acknowledged that this usage of the term ‘negativity’ is itself contentious.
Expression is, after all, a positive phenomenon: it is an act of transmission, of making something manifest or understood. One way that the word ‘express’ is defined is to
“squeeze out (liquid or air)” 2 – one might ‘express’ ointment from a tube. There is a sense in which we think of language like this, as the act of ‘squeezing’ meaning from ourselves: how can such an extrusion be negative? One does not, so to speak, ‘reverse- squeeze.’ Describing an ‘expressive negativity’ erects an opposition that, within any absolute architecture of language (which however it is conceived, functions via a great many indirect significative relationships) is perhaps difficult to justify: however we think about the signifier/signified relationship, something is evoked by language, and by being an evocation is necessarily positive. Where I see the value and validity of the term lies in its technical understanding: as a means of differentiating essentially ‘resolvable’ language, which might be clarified in terms of meaning, from the kinds of open, paradoxical, irresolvable linguistic relationships that commonly, although not exclusively, occur in poetry. That such relationships continue to offer meaning despite their irresolution is both the fascinating thing about the phenomenon and the very aspect which calls such ‘negativity’ into question.
Thanks are due to all the people who have helped me in the completion of this work.
The Macquarie University Philosophy Department in Sydney has been extremely supportive, and my two supervisors there, Jean-Philippe Deranty and Robert Sinnerbrink, have been brilliant, insightful and good humoured. Martin Harrison, from the University of Technology, Sydney, is due a world of gratitude for the endless conversations over red
2 The Oxford English Reference Dictionary, 2 nd Edition . Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995. 494. 16 wine and whiskey, without which the world would be a far less interesting place and my sense of it less acute. Thanks are also due to Professor Jean-François Courtine for his aid at Paris4 Sorbonne and Les Archives Husserl de Paris, and to Alain Pernet for his help at the Archives, as well as his general warmth and good feeling. Thanks are also due to
Stuart Cooke and Astrid L’Orange for their editing suggestions, and to my family: my mother Dorothy, for her endless support, my father, Nik, for never once telling me to get a haircut and get a real job, and to my sister, Annelies, for her appreciation of fine cheese and love of sharing it.
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18 Prelude
In the evenings walking the harbour’s edge, the light falls in liquid colour across the hulls and masts. Having recently returned from some time in Europe, I realise that this is the vivid brightness particular to Australia, a vibrancy that exists only here. Each evening
I come to watch the end of day, and each evening I find the same raft of boats, the same chiming stays, the same universe of melted colour buoying the curved white hulls. Each day the same and each utterly different: so little changes, yet everything does – its light, its music – and it is possible to become drawn into it, to give oneself to it completely.
Some days in heavy rain, if you walk dressed to withstand the weather, you can stay for what seems like hours at the furthest arch of land, looking out towards the heads and back to the Harbour Bridge, back towards the city. All around you, drops impact the arcane silver of the water, and the sound of meeting waters almost overcomes you, a complete immersion, which penetrates, it seems, to some other place, within you yet deeply concealed; as though you can hear within that sound the delicate ping of neurons, the firing of your synapses; as though there is an echo within your body of this marriage of ocean and rain.
What is the metaphysic of this opening, this sense-limited space? What is the resonance of expression that exists between body and world? Being, we might call it, perhaps following an eastern tangent, but this is also the place where ontology and the
Buddha’s Sutras might intersect. To this end we might describe it as a way of dwelling, in the Heideggerian sense, but that too feels somehow misleading, as if too ingrained with the history, weight and complexity that surrounds the German philosopher. No matter
19 how it is called, it is what it is, and this seems to be its message. Our task is to find names for things, to lay over them a blanket of symbols by which the mind might give them form.
Our violent ink, which seems so often to be everything we have, is not enough. What is enough in such moments is this liquid speech – a speech of things, upon which pale words prosper and bleed: a language of atoms that thoughtlessly know, of synapse and skin; a speech of rain that lands on the water like clicking tongues of the Kalahari San.
What seems enough is this endless beginning, which takes you and pulls you into its deep.
≈
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21 22 Introduction
...and what are poets for in a destitute time?
This question belongs originally to the elegy ‘Bread and Wine’ by the German
Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), although today it is perhaps most recognisable from its adoption by Martin Heidegger as the title for a late essay. 1
Heidegger writes at the time (the late 1940s) that the question itself can hardly be understood and it would be a difficult argument to show us to be any closer to an understanding now. And yet one would think this question as necessary today as it was when it was broached, when Hölderlin first put it to page – certainly our ‘era’ seems to move as insistently towards the ‘darkness’ which, for Heidegger at least, originally inspired the poet’s query: the “beginning and end of the day of the Gods. Night is falling.” 2
One wonders, however, who is interested in an answer, or what perceived relevance any response might have in our particular late-capitalist/hyper-consumerist world; poetry, after all, claims an ever-shrinking place in the lives of us moderns – we are far more interested in iPods and plasma TVs than struggling over the linguistic hieroglyphs of poems. The relationship between God and poetry, as Heidegger positions his inquiry in the opening lines, seems to us somewhat forced and distorted. For Heidegger this is part of the point: if we cannot even fully understand the question, how might we understand the response, whether it comes from Hölderlin or ourselves.
1 ‘What are Poets For?’ in Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Though, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York, Perennial Classics, 2001. 89. Henceforth WPF. 2 ibid. 23 Part of this lack of understanding might be attributed to the somewhat effete image that poetry possesses in our modern (contemporary) Western lives, being so often understood, rightly or wrongly, as an old-fashioned pursuit, ‘art for art’s sake.’ There is nothing overtly wrong with this view, except that it diminishes any functionality that might be identified within poetic expression. Certainly the spiritualisation of the poem that
Heidegger is seeking appears distant and strange (if it was even justifiable at the time), but beyond this, the idea of the use of the poem, or of poetic language, dissolves behind the notion that the poem arrives as a momentary interaction between poet and word, the value of which is limited to artistic expression. The poem attaches us to an ancient tradition that goes to the root of what is commonly called civilisation, a time and a place where the lyre and voice were the anchors that bound us to a real and mythologised world. To many people, the place of the poet in the early part of the 21 st Century is something akin to the Amish: a curious novelty of aesthetic severity and antique technology.
What are poets, after all? They’re not really philosophers, although they reach towards many of the same ideals, and often search out responses to the same questions of existence and meaning. Neither are they ethical or spiritual guides, although they have long told us how to live: with this in mind, the role of the poet in Australia, or England or
America for that matter, strikes me as incomparably different from the role he or she might have in a culture like Iran, in which poetry continues to have a prominent mainstream existence, and where censorship makes an invaluable tool of poetry’s often intense codification; or China, where a poet might be imprisoned or even executed for not kowtowing to autocracy. By contrast, it is the sheer volume and multiplicity of voices that effectively silences the ‘Western’ poet, which subsumes his or her voice in the glorious cacophony of ‘choice and freedom.’ The poet might speak out against the
24 treatment of asylum seekers, or the plight of an indigenous population, but their voice will carry little weight when compared, say, to a Big Brother contestant, or a sports star.
With this in mind, we might locate the diminishing importance of poetry in its particular form of expression, might claim, perhaps, that it demands of its reader a set of skills that are on the decline, skills which in some respects clash with the highly visual multi-sensory media of today’s entertainment environment. These kinds of answers, however, focus on the aesthetics of our engagement: what we are saying is that, in a way, poetry is just not immediately exciting enough to compete with more conspicuously modern forms of entertainment; that its surface is not comparably enticing, that its interior is not sufficiently apparent or is too difficult to penetrate.
I would like, however, to redirect this question to that which lies behind/within/beyond the particular communicative sensory exterior of that surface and towards the poem’s frequently challenging and operose interior. Further, over the course of the thesis, this question will be framed in terms of what might be described as a certain necessary difficulty of the poem: to ask what the relation is between the different forms of linguistic negativity that poetry employs, and any ultimate use or function of the poem that is more than aesthetic. Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty render their work in a highly poetic prose style, and one of the questions that emerges is what, exactly, is achieved by their employment of this kind of language? Underlying this examination is the assumption that the poem’s language is chosen through more than aesthetic criteria, but rather seeks to articulate that for which there is no other expression.
Once we accept that poetry has a particular power of representation, of elucidation, the links between poetry and philosophy become self-evident: if the poem can say what can
25 otherwise not be said, then it is logical enough to claim that, at certain moments, what philosophy requires approximates the poem.
Yet there is a much documented quarrel between poetry and philosophy that is as old as the disciplines themselves. Despite Plato’s admiration for the poets and his own poetic form of philosophy, poets are banished from his ideal city, to return only should they prove their worth: a possibility which is opened and subsequently dismissed for the good of the citizenry. At the root of this banishment is the epistemic criticism of the poet’s inability to “understand” – the poet is an ‘imitator,’ nothing more: “all the poetic company from Homer onwards are imitators of images of virtue . . . but do not lay hold of truth.” 3 Further, there is a moral criticism: that the poet’s images are seen to affect emotion rather than reason, which “arouses and fosters and strengthens this [emotional] part of the soul, and destroys the rational part.” 4
Immediately, then, one of the oppositions that underlie this impasse begins to emerge—poetry is the language of emotion and Ipso facto is the opposite of rational discourse.
One question that might be asked, then, is if this distinction between ‘rational’ and
‘emotional’ discourse is in itself valid? Beyond the reductive confinement of poetry to
‘emotion,’ can we so simply disentangle the emotional and the rational themselves, or are there unavoidable threads running between them, weaving and being woven by a complex and partly ambiguous web of linguistic intention? 5 In a simple sense, we know the difference between poetry and philosophy: the former employs verse and linguistic
3 Plato Republic ‘Book X’ 607C-609B, in Great Dialogues of Plato, trans. W.H.D. Rouse. New York, Mentor, 1956. 600B – 601E. 400. 4 ibid. 603E – 605 B. 405. 5 Aristotle departs from Plato on precisely this point, attributing a specific value to poetry and ‘poetic truth’. See Aristotle, Poetics , trans. N.G.L. Hammond. Copenhagen, Museum Tuscalanum Press, 2001. See also Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1990. 26 tropes to reveal or emphasise truths and possibilities; it seeks to be beautiful; it takes language with a certain freedom, and treats grammar and syntactic connections with a level of distain; meaning, poetry wants to say, is equal parts sediment and flux.
Philosophy, by contrast, is at heart the search for answers: even in its most cynical contemporary manifestations, it relies upon language’s ability to offer such answers (even as it denies it/them), relies, that is, and has faith in, a form of reason.
The most apparent of these differences, then, arrives in the way these two disciplines employ, rely on, and put faith in, language. An initial intuitive response here might be that philosophical language seeks to state truths with a clarity and precision in which poetry has no interest. And yet, the linguistic arrangements we find in poetry demonstrate a high level of precision. This is true throughout poetic history: although how this precision is manifest changes, there is a comparable element of specificity between the strict forms of rhyme and meter of traditional verse structures and the idea of le mot juste which continues to have a defining presence in contemporary free verse.
One point to make here is that the forms of linguistic connection sought by the poet are different from those employed by the philosopher: for the poet, cadence, meaning, musicality and a certain ‘weighing’ and sound-shape all come into play. For the philosopher (at least in theory), what is of principal importance is reasoning: is the argument sound, does the sentence mean what it is intended to? And yet, the poem is still an exercise in making sense , in truth telling, in questions answered.
The poem argues for something .
Poetry seeks to reveal certain truths by employing precise yet open-ended relationships with meaning, attempting to re-draw semantic meaning via different forms of linguistic negativity. The relationship between poetic negativity and this particular model of truth-
27 telling does not begin with Mallarmé, although he formalised it into a highly original aesthetic. It finds, if not a birth, then its most articulate voice, in Early German
Romanticism, which presents the poetic as capable of transcending the problems of representation that were appearing in post-Kantian theory.
The Romantic idea, put in the parlance of our age, is that the poem does indeed show us something of the world, that in fact it ‘speaks the world’ in a way that other discourses, such as the technological, the economic or that of empirical philosophical reason, do not, and that it is possible that such language reveals a truth that is all the more profound, all the more penetrating, for its resisting reduction into the rational
Enlightenment discourses, for its break with direct semantic meaning. Within this breakdown new meanings are revealed, new truths disclosed.
The argument presented here is that within this breakdown and irreducibility is found precisely the necessity for poetic engagement.
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The whole history of modern poetry is a running
commentary on the following brief philosophical text: all
art should become science; poetry and philosophy should
be made one.
Athenaeum Fragment 115
29 30 1
Romantic Origins
While a number of philosophers and poets do, either implicitly (via, perhaps, a subtle alteration of philosophical language) or explicitly (through the direct exploration of the poetic, such as we find in Jean-Luc Nancy and Heidegger) address the divide between philosophy and poetry, it is within Early Romanticism that we see this attempted synthesis find its distinct and early form. The following chapter will examine the birth of
Romanticism that begins and ends in several years of furious creative energy in the small
German town of Jena at the end of the 18 th Century, with the aim of drawing out some themes that will be important and pervasive for the remainder of this thesis. So, although we will be touching on the broader movement of Romanticism, epitomised by poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, what particularly holds our interest here is
Early German Romanticism, a movement grounded equally in literature and philosophy.
Isaiah Berlin describes Romanticism as:
the largest recent movement to transform the lives and the thought of the Western world. It
seems to me to be the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has
occurred, and all the other shifts which have occurred in the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries appear to be in comparison less important, and at any rate deeply
influenced by it. 6
From Page 29. Athenaeum Fragment 115 in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester. Albany, State University of New York Press, 1988. 13. Henceforth cited as LA. 6 Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism. London, Pimlico, 2000. 1-2. 31
This ‘shift’ in consciousness was a celebration of imagination over scientific knowledge, intuition over logic, and creative forms of understanding over philosophical reason. In two hundred years, how we respond to these polarities has changed, yet in some respects, the ideas that were projected from this moment with such force and enthusiasm continue to circulate within our contemporary cultural/critical/metaphysical stew—What are the expressive capacities of art? What importance should we attribute to our relationship to nature? What are the limits of this thing called language? Of reason?—these queries remain at the forefront of cultural and philosophical inquiry. 7
The Romantic urge, then, remains unfulfilled, its insights partially undigested.
A range of theoretical departures have extended, confounded, confused and delineated the terms of the ‘dilemma’ of the Enlightenment, a dilemma which underlies these questions. Although we need not put it as strongly as Max Horkheimer and Theodor
Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment that “the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity,” 8 the modern explosion of ‘reason,’ science and technology, has brought us face to face with a very particular set of preoccupations and concerns.
The most immediately topical of these is the problem of ecology, a question of how we, as human beings, can live in a non-destructive relationship with the biosphere which sustains us. This is not a question which Romanticism needed to grapple with, at least not with the same urgency we face it today, yet this question begins with Romanticism: firstly, because in order for it to be asked required a shift in how we understand our relationship to nature, a shift that began with the Romantics; secondly, because at the
7 See, for example, Simon Critchley, Very Little, Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature. London and New York, Routledge, 1997. Also, Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory. London and New York, Routledge, 1997. 8 Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2002. 1. 32 very point the idea of nature was being Romantically reconfigured, the industrial infrastructure which would eventually begin to transform our planet was also undergoing a grimy, vaporous birth.
The Romantic Movement can be considered as an early reaction to many of the problems that emerged with the Enlightenment and which continue to confront us today.
Enlightenment thinking elevated reason and science as the paths towards knowledge: knowledge of the world, or for that matter, knowledge of God. Descartes had made major advances in philosophy and mathematics in the 1600s, and Newton had revolutionised the sciences with discoveries in calculus and gravitation a half-century or so following
(his Philosophiae naturalis principia mathematica was published in 1687). The changes wrought by these men, amongst others, were still being digested: nature was under apparently ever increasing scientific control, and the power of reason was such that, with it, all the world’s questions were expected to fall, one before the next.
However, these new foundations of science and rationalism, by which the spiritual, social and cultural universes were thought to soon to be ordered with equal precision as
Newtonian theory had ordered the physical universe, offered little by way of replacement to the moral, ethical and social glue of human cultural life that superstition and religion
(amongst other things) had previously supplied. The Romantics were in part responding to a moment of upheaval and adjustment, not the least of which was the French
Revolution, which, at the end of the 18 th Century, was destabilising and redrawing the social and political map of Europe.
At this time, Karl Leonhard Reinhold was helping to build the philosophy department at Jena University into a significant critical force. His lectures on Immanuel Kant drew great numbers, and his promotion of Kant created allies in Friedrich Schiller and Gottlieb
Fichte, who joined the university’s professorial staff in 1794. In 1798, Friedrich Schelling
33 joined the department, then just 23 years old, and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie would also influence the direction taken by Romantic ideology. Fichte was forced from the university by Carl August in 1799, amidst accusations of atheism, and shortly thereafter
Hegel was to join the staff, remaining there until 1807. 9
One sees then that the two initiators of the movement, Friedrich and August Schlegel, were surrounded by some of the brightest burning philosophical stars of their day, so although it is chiefly the writings of these two, as well as that of Novalis (the pen name for Friedrich Von Hardenburg), that have come to characterise for us the nature and output of the Romantics, they had some powerful influences close at hand. Besides the brothers and Novalis, Dorothea and Caroline Schlegel, and August Ludwig Hülsen, amongst others, contributed with varying significance to the briefly existent Romantic journal, the Athenaeum , while Hölderlin and Goethe also had significant influence on the formation of the group’s ideas.
The flame in Jena, however, burned short and bright, and within a few years and a few hundred pages of critical output, the group was disbanded. 10
The Kantian Origins of Romantic Theory
Kant played a central role in the development of Romantic ideology, although this is not without irony. Kant despised Romanticism, as he did any form of what he called
Schwärmerei (vagueness, fancy or mysticism). Unsurprisingly then, Kant’s influence is principally found in the ways in which the Romantics appropriated, radicalised, and critiqued his work.
9 Robert J. Richards The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago, University of Chicago, 2002. 43-50. 10 LA, 7. 34 The inquiry that begins Romanticism is the question which opens Kant’s third
Critique , The Critique of Judgment (1790) 11 : that is, how is it that we judge something to be beautiful... or not? Kant’s discussion focuses on how judgments of taste (the beautiful, the sublime) are possible, and also gives an account of the teleological approach to judging nature. Within this discussion, the Critique of Judgment attempts to construct a bridge between Kant’s first and second Critiques, arguing that the experience of pleasure in beauty is both a sensuous, non-conceptual, understanding, as well as a “symbol of morality.” 12 This relationship between the sensuous, non-conceptual understanding and
‘morality’ indicates an important point of departure. As Alison Ross writes:
the moral figure can, in a very important sense, only be known in sensible forms as a
paragon, that is, as an aesthetic figure. . . . Despite the fact that such a thesis contradicts
Kant’s conception of moral action, a compelling case can be made that the moral man is
understood first and foremost as an aesthetic image presented as an object of inspiration
and emulation. 13
This ‘aestheticisation’ goes to the heart of the Romantic adoption and transfiguration of
Kant’s work. We will explore the importance of the ‘presentation’ of the ‘image’ shortly: what needs to be emphasised is the way that the ‘moral figure’ comes to be seen as sensible via an aesthetic response that is not possible through the faculties of theoretical and moral-practical reason.
For Kant, the aesthetic response is located within the particular (that is, individual) response to beauty: such beauty is not a product, for instance, of an artwork in itself, but rather was seen as the subject’s consciousness of the pleasure resulting from the freeplay 11 Kant, Immanuel, The Critique of Judgment , trans. J.H.Bernard. Mineola, Dover Publications, 2005. Henceforth cited as CJ. 12 CJ, 148. 13 Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007. 42. 35 of the imagination and the understanding. At the same time, such judgments give us the feeling that they lay hold of some kind of universal validity: we do not call an object beautiful and expect it to please only ourselves, but rather expect agreement from other impartial or disinterested subjects to accompany our judgment. 14
This separation of the faculty of Judgement from theoretical and moral-practical reason means that the beautiful object appears to us as an object of a-conceptual ‘pure delight.’
Our engagement with it is seen as devoid of interest, which means, in Heidegger’s words, that our encounter with it allows the object “to come before us in its own stature and worth” and “the essential relation of the object itself comes into play.” 15 The idea of
‘interest’ here is illustrative of the way in which we read our intentions and desires into our plans for the object: such interests are not present in this ‘pure’ interaction.
Such a ‘pure’ relation encompasses the free play of understanding and imagination, and it is from here that a new kind of relationship emerges between the subject and the aesthetic object. The experience of pleasure in beauty is seen as being reducible neither to theoretical knowledge (concepts) nor to moral judgments (principles): it is separate from the act of reason and separate from the cognitive processes by which other judgments are made.
It is within this separation of reason and aesthetic judgment that the express distinction between philosophy and literature, which until this point was not systematised, becomes both possible and necessary. 16
A clear distinction between aesthetic judgments and theoretical and practical reason locates a specific value in art and literature, positions them as revelatory, as potentially 14 CJ, 34-35. 15 Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 1. The Will to Power as Art. San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1991. 109. 16 LA, x. 36 offering alternative sources of knowledge to that gained via reason. The possibility of conceiving of the artwork as in itself revelatory gains added importance when joined with another implication of the Kantian system. For Kant the world ‘as it is’ was a world of conditions, and each condition was explained by the discovery of the prior condition by which it was made possible. So “it is properly the unconditioned alone that reason seeks .
. . It wishes, to speak in another way, to attain to completeness in the series of premisses, so as to render it unnecessary to presuppose others.” 17
We arrive, that is to say, at a regress of conditions. Sooner or later, what is required is a grounding proposition, the ‘unconditioned,’ which can rest in itself and requires no further explanation, no further condition on which it itself must be grounded. 18 Without such a condition there is an infinite theoretical regress, each condition resting on the next, but all of which trail out into an abyss in which “reason has no ground.” 19 Kant responds by locating the conditions of the possibility of knowledge within our cognitive powers, effectively making the subject its own ground of knowledge – a ‘Copernican turn’ that attempts to avoid this regress. The problem, however, is that such a position is seen to locate not a knowledge of the truth of things as they are, but rather a truth limited to how things appear .20
This relocation of philosophical truth to the realm of the subject, its limitation to the world of appearances, rather than the world in itself, has important consequences for the grounds and validity of knowledge and reason: the subject is separated from the possibility of any foundation that he or she is not responsible for, which can only lead, according to Friedrich Jacobi, to ‘nihilism.’ 21 Jacobi’s concern centred on the idea that
17 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason , trans. J.M.D. Meiklejohn. Sioux Falls, NuVision Publications, 2005. 245. 18 Bowie, 1997. 33. 19 Kant 2005. 244. 20 Bowie, 1997. 33. 21 F.H. Jacobi. ‘Jacobi an Fichte,’ in F.H. Jacobi’s Werke Vol. 3. Leipzig, Fleisher, 1816. S 1-57. See also: Bowie, 1997. 31. 37 philosophy was seen not to explain the world as it is , but only attempt a representation of it in terms of cognitive experience. Jacobi expressed it like so:
We appropriate the universe for ourselves by tearing it apart and making a picture-, idea-,
and world-world which is appropriate to our capabilities, and completely unlike the real
world. What we make in this way we understand, to the extent to which it is our creation,
completely; what cannot be made in this way we do not understand; our philosophical
understanding does not reach beyond its own production. 22
A central tenet of Philosophy – that there was a truth waiting within the world that simply required unearthing – was thus problematised. Philosophy came to be seen as a ‘re- presentation’ of a truth to which it had limited access, and the power of re-presentation itself was being called into question. If the foundations of philosophy are to be found in philosophy, then proving or disproving a philosophical truth lends its weight to only that; the proof or disproof of a philosophical truth – an idea, but not a real thing, not a truth of the world. 23
Jacobi’s response partly echoed that found in Kant, although where Kant claimed our knowledge to be limited purely to the way things appear, with unmediated access to things in themselves accessible only to God, Jacobi reasoned that such a foundation for knowledge was possible for the subject also, but that it was only so if one had faith in
God: the choice was therefore between a nihilistic existence and one with God as its defining anchor and vision. 24
22 Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Mosses Mendelssohn von F.H.Jacobi , Friedrich Perthes, 1799, in Bowie, 1997. 40. 23 Bowie, 1997. 16-7, 69. 24 ibid., 39-40. 38 Darstellung : The Romantic Response
This loss of foundations has, in one version or another, becomes more or less the defining experience and motif of much 20 th and 21 st Century philosophy. Jacobi, significantly ahead of his time, was to have his insights echoed for a few hundred years in thinkers as diverse as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida. But Novalis and the other
Romantics came to see the failure of philosophy to ground itself as an opportunity to search for a medium which was capable of expressing an alternative foundation. Jacobi had made space for ‘true’ knowledge via the introduction of God, but for the Romantics access to the underlying structures of reality, structures not accessible via reason, was opened via other forms of the absolute: poetry and art. The Romantics did not argue that an ultimate truth was entirely expoundable through literature. They theorised, however, that the aesthetic might be understood as a grounding in itself – a ‘presentation’ rather than a ‘re-presentation’ of truth which avoided the regress of the unconditioned.
This notion of the artwork or poem as ‘presentation’ ( Darstellung ) centres on the sensory nature of the work, its ‘sensibilisation’ of the concept. 25 If the concept is understood via the senses, rather than being limited to logico-discursive linguistic structures, the problem of truth’s ‘re-presentation’ ceases, for what is communicated in the senses is seen as the evocation of something new—truth brought to visibility rather than symbolically ‘re-presented.’
There is a shift, then, from literature and art being conceived of as mimetic, which we find emphasised in Plato and Aristotle, to art being itself a form of revelation or 25 LA, viii. See also: Ross, 2007. Alison Ross extends the Kantian model of ‘presentation’ into the writings of Martin Heidegger, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Clarifying the importance and possibility of the idea, Ross writes of the ambitions of Nancy’s philosophy, for instance, as “articulating an ontology that is not beholden to original meaning.” 135. We can see how this connects with a Romantic framework, and the importance of such an ‘original meaning’ will become increasingly central in subsequent chapters. 39 disclosure: to borrow a turn of phrase from Merleau-Ponty, the difference between art which ‘speaks the world’ and art which merely reflects it. If cognition is incapable of access to the world as it is , then what was apparently necessary was such knowledge as might be accessed in acts of sensuous revelation and comprehension.
Literature thus becomes what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy describe as a “metaphysics of art,” 26 and further, a religious art inasmuch as it theorises the work to represent a
“remainderless presentation of the truth.” 27 Its theorisation as ‘remainderless’ is important, for what we see in Kant is a necessary remainder in representation as that portion that is knowable only to God.
It is for this reason that w e read in the so-called ‘Oldest System Program of German
Idealism’ (co-authored, it is believed, by Hegel, Schelling and Hölderlin, 1796) that “the philosopher must contain just as much aesthetic power ... as the poet.” 28 Within the
Kantian blend of imagination and cognition, there exists the possibility of interplay between the mind’s power of categorisation and its image producing capability in the form of imagination: in this freeplay of the facilities neither becomes dominant and there emerges, moreover, the possibility of aesthetic pleasure and the suspension of final meaning .29 Kant writes of the aesthetic idea as a representation of the imagination which gives much to think about, but which is not accompanied by any determinate thought, with no concept being able to adequate it. Consequently, no language can completely attain and make it comprehensible. 30 So, in the face of ‘aesthetic ideas,’ ‘final meaning’ is impossible, as is the re-presentation of any truth they offer. This evasion of
26 LA, 78. 27 LA, xvi. 28 ‘The so-called ‘Oldest System Program of German Idealism’ (1796) in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche . Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990. 265. 29 Bowie, 1997. 58-9. 30 Kant, Critique of Judgment in Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990. 29. 40 conceptualisation is the key: the work reveals something, but that something cannot be redrawn and transformed into a logico-discursive framework. This is a persistent idea within Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics. Paul Ricoeur, for instance, writes of the poem:
The effacement of the ostensive and descriptive reference liberates a power of reference
to aspects of our being in the world that cannot be said in a direct descriptive way, but
only alluded to, thanks to the referential values of metaphoric and, in general, symbolic
expression. 31
This understanding of the artwork or poem supports irreducibility as an essential tool for philosophical revelation . The language of art, being a language of the senses, maintains an untranslatable quality which is inaccessible to cognition. We see within the idea of a
‘literary absolute’ the representation of the possibility of the articulation of the absolute, not as something which might be theorised and contained through discourse – it is the infinite, as critical fragment 47 states, that which one cannot know 32 – but something which despite the impossibility of absolute capture, remains a palpable presence. The literary absolute is the presentation within literature of that which is in some way sensible, yet is ultimately unrepresentable.
Yet although not claiming that knowledge of the absolute may be brought to clear representation, the Romantics theorised a partial showing, a glimpse of that which can never be clearly represented because “it cannot become an object.” 33 The literary absolute, however, and the absolute that finds some form of representation in the art object, does not then show the absolute as itself, as an object within a defined field of 31 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Fort Worth, Texas, Christian University Press, 1976. 25. 32 Critical Fragment 47 in LA, 98. 33 Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London and New York, Routledge, 1993. 49. 41 objects, but is rather the indefinite presence towards which the artwork reaches, sighted in a glancing vision. The real world is there, then, in its sensuous revelation of itself: we engage it not with our reason, but with our senses.
In order that this ‘artistic transcendental’ be articulated, our system of symbolic representation must remain in some way open: there must still be an element of mystery, of the unknown and of unknowability, in order that this revelation is successful, because of the necessity of this ‘partial’ element of revelation, the impossibility of objectification.
The ‘presentation’ of truth, therefore, needs to be fragmentary, incomplete.
Here the fragment becomes the defining genre of Romantic production. We need to understand this in terms of Jacobi’s words that philosophy represents only itself; that is, it
‘makes its own world.’ In ‘appropriating the universe for ourselves’ we create a circular system in which one sign points only to another sign for its definition, its ground, and so on ad infinitum . But what if our symbolic system is conceived of as continuing to engage the world, the senses, a meaning structure that remains in some way open to the absolute?
The sign cannot be defined solely by reference to another sign if there is an unresolved, sensory aspect to its meaning.
We are moving here beyond the Kantian conditioned/unconditioned dyad and into more explicit theories of language and symbol, yet we can see they originate in what is essentially the same problem. The fragment will become the defining symbol and system of Romantic literary production because it is by its very nature open-ended, and the impasse named by Jacobi, originating in Kant, applies to language that is conceived of as a self-enclosed system. Fragmentation is by nature and definition open. Motivating this
42 open-endedness is an idea of incompletion as engaging the work in the ‘complete whole’ of sensory experience; a “living unity,” 34 as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy put it.
Truth here emerges within incompletion.
34 LA, 42. 43 44 2
Poetic Revelation
in German Romanticism
A fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated
from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a
hedgehog.
1 Athenaeum Fragment 206
The Fragment
The fragments that came to define Romanticism were a series of multiply authored literary ‘fragments’ predominantly published in the Athenaeum . The following chapter will explore the literary strategies and themes that emerge in the fragments, and several other Romantic writings, in order to link them to the theme of ‘artistic revelation.’ The themes of textual incompletion and linguistic negativity will become increasingly central to our inquiry.
These fragments were intended to produce a work that was complete unto itself but entirely open-ended, which might be added to at any moment yet was self-contained and apparently full. The fecund piece of fragmented prose cited above is rich in both language and complexity. Theoretically self-demonstrative and elegant, what it indicates to us first is the Romantic penchant for self-definition and an endless search within the 1 Athenaeum fragment 206. LA, 43. 45 work for a theory of the work. As a fragment offering a definition of the fragment, it performatively depicts and simultaneously enacts what it is that it describes. The image of the literary work that it presents models the hedgehog itself: a complete organism that is an organic unity, separate from the world, yet inextricably a part of it, linked in a symbiotic chain to its ecosystem, to other hedgehogs, just as the fragment is definitively part of something greater.
The choice of animal is also relevant: this small, waddling mammal, inglorious but endearing, offers an ironic face to any theoretical model. Being one of the most celebrated fragments the Athenaeum produced, the hedgehog has become something of a symbol of the fragment, yet what a self-deprecating symbol for a philosophical endeavor
– conjuring images of slow movement and a bumbling manner, the hedgehog is the most peculiar mascot of “aesthetic absolutism” 2 that one might imagine. And yet, it is barbed and impenetrable, offering little by way of ingress, keeping all who approach at a distance: “Beware,” it says, “to all who take my small stature as a sign easy prey—I am no mere mouthful.”
The fragment demonstrates a paradoxical relationship between unity and separation, singularity and universality. Yet, the paradox is incomplete, being understood in relation to a certain organicity that we meet here. It is as though through the fragment we are attempting to model our own subjective being, which is both of and within the world (that is, we are physically, physiologically, spatially, linguistically, culturally, part of our environment) and yet in terms of the experiential aspect of consciousness itself, transcends that environment: the cogito is ever a moment of singular internal activity and although extensive connectivity with our environment is apparent in a number of ways, our relationship with it always returns to some kind of existence as a singular entity. 2 This phrase originates from Bernhard Lypp’s Ästhetischer Absolutismus und politische Vernunft. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1972. 46 Another aspect of the fragment which coincides with (contemporary) notions of subjectivity is that it is conceived of as a perpetual of process: Athenaeum fragment 116, in yet another moment of self definition, describes Romantic poetry as that which will
“forever be becoming and never be perfected.” 3 What is inaugurated, then, is a model of totality that is plural, processual, and without end, and which is engaged by, and in some respects discovered in, the artwork. Romantic theory locates this totality as present within each fragment, each of which is seen as representing and containing the whole.
Within this open-endedness appear moments of abrupt crystallisation, the ‘lightning flash’ in which truth becomes visible. The Romantics describe this as Witz :4 the term also means wit, or joke, which itself is telling as an expression of the idea of indirect representation of truth; that the moment of revelation comes as a kind of spark which cannot be systematised.
The lightning flash of revelation is by nature non-conceptual – a sensory revelation, a sensibilisation of the idea; the idea as a presentation of truth by which the infinite reveals itself within moments of the sublime. Such sensory revelation is that flash that arrives when we stand before an artwork, or lose ourselves in a novel or poem and catch a glimpse of the whole. It might be described in that moment of the sublime arriving at the end of a long climb on a steep, isolated rock face—the day spent edging past death and beauty, to sit finally, exhausted, fingers burning, and off into endless distance the mountains falling one beneath another. The ‘sense’ transmitted here directly challenges the very ground and idea of linguistic re-presentation, of the translation from one medium to another.
The fragment, then, is seen as the perfect vehicle to express this moment because of its natural brevity, its way of touching on a topic without landing. The truth of the fragment 3 Athenaeum fragment 116 in LA, 43. 4 LA, 52. 47 is always moving beyond the individual fragment in question – towards other fragments or the world itself.
Each fragment was intended to be its own system. Here we find one difference between how the Romantics—and we are speaking especially of Friedrich Schlegel here, who champions the fragment (often in opposition to the remainder of the group)— conceived of this form’s departure from the aphorism, the essay or, for that matter, the book. This was a self-sufficient system, yet one that gained complete meaning only within the context of all the others, presumably written and unwritten. Where the philosophical text might be seen as fragmentary – one piece of the great philosophical puzzle that comprises the world – the fragment itself was conceived of as something more: a kind of philosophical truth-point whereby each paragraph, each sentence, of a text might comprise its own system, its own model of truth.
Friedrich Schlegel writes in his notebooks that “even the greatest system is merely a fragment,” 5 which leaves us asking what precisely this means for the individual function of the fragments themselves. Considering Schlegel’s comment, we reach the possibility that all theory is effectively nothing more than a web of connective philosophical sets and subsets, where each system displays dependence and independence, and can be considered as one facet of a larger systemic fragment, and then another, extending each into a virtually infinite web of possible connections and interconnections.
Truth, the individual, and meaning might be likewise thought via this idea of facet and totality, and thus all cultural artefacts might be seen only as small moments of specificity within the whole. This idea supports the Romantic conception of universal holism, but undermines the idea that a particular piece of literature like the fragment should be 5 Friedrich Schlegel Literary Notebooks, in Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments , trans. Peter Firchow. Minnesota, University of Minnesota Press, 1991. xii. 48 considered different from any other form of literature. The work of art, the poem, the fragment, or even the book, if they are viewed in the right light, might then be seen to contain their own extensive systems. It might, then, be claimed that all writing (indeed, any artwork at all) is fragmentary, connecting with other works of literature, in some respects with the whole history of literature itself. In this way, any work of art that is conceived of as a ‘revelation of truth’ is its own fragment, its own system. 6
Although this argument has some validity, it remains true that the combination of brevity, self-definition, irony and extended metaphor (present in fragment 206, for example), finds little comparison in other forms, poetic or philosophical.
The fragments were intended as a systematisation of the idea of fragmented philosophy: the coming together of form and content in a work that had as its very heart a creative negativity. Such negativity exists as an absence of resolution that was a central component of the text. These ‘generative absences’ were integral to the structure of the fragments, and it is this intentional systematisation of negativity that most conspicuously separates the fragments from other philosophical methodologies.
Beyond all else, the fragments represent a model of totality that is complete in and of itself, yet which seeks completion as part of the system as a whole. The completeness of the fragment is an individual completeness within a necessary plurality. The individual nature of the fragments means that we can never ‘recreate’ the whole in theory through systematic discursive practice – that is, through a rationally grounded and articulated conceptual whole – but that the closest we can come is a fragmentary representation.
For the Romantics, then, there can be no revelation of truth via a ‘rigid’ philosophical path. As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe put it, “truth cannot be obtained by the solitary path of demonstration (ridiculed in Athenaeum fragment 82), but rather by that of exchange,
6 See, for example, Roland Barthes’ S/Z (1974). 49 mixing, friendship...” 7 In this way the fragment is representative of the idea of holistic truth, with the Romantic ‘system’ as a representation of the possible patency of duality; a contextually-bound truth that maintains at the same time the contours of the absolute.
That truth may be fragmentary, therefore, does not exclude its unity; it is only that such a unity is by its nature fragmentary; a unity of plurality.
When we read these fragments one thing that strikes us is their linguistic and theoretical circularity. Their punctuation is closed; they begin with an idea, frequently encased within an image, and then end. There is never the sense that, should we place each piece one after another, we could create a narrativised philosophical movement from them, put them into chapters and call them a ‘treatise.’ They are simply too closed off, too isolated. Athenaeum fragment 206 is a good illustration: the final image of the hedgehog encapsulates the idea, incongruous yet oddly sensical, leaving no room for any further development, yet resonating with a sharp, flat corporeality through the whole of the fragment. Here, it seems to say, is the idea as object; it has its own place, its own world.
We discussed above the significant irony that the hedgehog, of all animals, would be seen as a representative metaphor for Romantic philosophy, but it is worth thinking further on this. Besides the deflationary aspect of this image of the bumbling animal, its
‘prickliness,’ suggesting both literature itself and the impenetrability of that literature, the impenetrability of the fragment itself, there is the fact, not of this animal specifically, but of an animal. Why would they want to represent this movement with a living creature, be it hedgehog, hyena or donkey?
7 LA, 45. 50 The central point to be made here is the shifting relationship with nature that the
Romantics were both responding to and fostering: the choice of an animal as
‘representative’ signals this improved affinity with the natural world. This point will be discussed in more length in a moment, but we can emphasise a few aspects of the animal as a general metaphor. The first is its unity: the animal is a complete system, with its organs, habits and other characteristics functioning to keep it alive. Further, its unity is attached to the greater unity of the ecosystem: the animal is self-reliant, yet clearly it requires its habitat in order to survive. The irreducibility of the animal is also significant: one cannot dissect it and still have a functional creature afterwards.
This organic irreducibility offers an all-encompassing model of Romantic truth.
Richard McDonough, following Wittgenstein, writes: “the concept of a living being has an indeterminacy very similar to the concept of language,”8 and we find a similar organic conception of the linguistic system emerge in Merleau-Ponty, who writes that “language is much more like a sort of being than a means, and that is why it can present something to us so well.” 9 Language, the poem and the living being all fail to be explained through their dissection into their various parts: the organism of living being and the living organism of language, which although they may be reduced to expressions of system, can never find complete expression therein. Dissection kills the living thing, just as the breakdown of an artwork or poem into its various symbolic elements via critique does nothing to capture its ‘true’ meaning, and does not adequately explain why it should function as it does.
8 Richard McDonough, ‘Wittgenstein, German Organicism, Chaos, and the Center of Life’ in the Journal of the History of Philosophy Vol. 42.No. 3, 2004. 321. 9 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ in Signs , trans. Richard C. Mcleary. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. 43. Henceforth cited as ILVS. 51 The animal, then, epitomises the organically based holism that is at the heart of the
Romantic conception of art and truth.
Opposing a scientific discourse which would attempt to break things into their composite parts in order to better understand them, the holistic model sees such a discourse as only producing a fragmented understanding of the world: our knowledge of the eye, for instance, to borrow from Merleau-Ponty, does not explain the formation of the image within the mind, and it is upon this image that we build our visual sense of world and self. Thus although we might understand the eye as a series of quasi- mechanical parts, to understand vision , we must conceive of the eye as a totality, and further, as an entire creature: an organism, the eyes of which have an intricate relationship with functioning of that organism – mind and body, producing a visual world that transcends any functional account of vision.
Holistic Meaning and the Union of Philosophy, Nature and Art
The changing way in which animals were viewed in Romanticism signposted a transformation in how nature was perceived more generally. At this time, an attitude emerged in which nature was seen as sacred and alive, and the human participation with it as a participation with a unitary and interconnected system – a system which itself revealed pathways to truth. This transformation is most visible in the way the natural world is taken up by Romantic painters: William Turner, for instance, or Caspar David
Friedrich. In these artists nature was imbued with holiness and transcendence, literally glowing with its own inner truth.
Such a truth was intuitive, sensory and holistic, and this model is a uniting motif of the movement, common from the theoretical perspectives of Romanticism as it was
52 propounded in Jena, to the visual artists, and Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Keats.
Such a model resisted totalising ‘scientific’ forms of understanding – not as an outright rejection of science (indeed, the sciences were hugely influential on Romanticism 10 ), but as a criticism of scientism : the propensity to uncritically privilege the norms of science as defining a totalising form of discourse.
In this, the Romantic reconfiguration of nature was a direct challenge to the model of the natural offered by the Enlightenment. Francis Bacon used the words natura torturata to describe nature ‘laid upon the slab’: dead, ready to give up secrets that remained hidden when in a state of “natural liberty.” 11 Nature was thus represented via mechanistic principles and metaphors with humankind entirely separated from it. Descartes too represented animals as automata, incapable of language or feeling. Although such ideas were challenged by thinkers such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume and Locke, the strict division between animal and man was maintained, in essence by the human capacity for reason. 12 Although ‘man and beast’ were in this way considered as separate in
Enlightenment thought, the Cartesian mechanisation of the concept of animality was also applied to the human body, which was seen as a machine.
Contra this idea of natura torturata, Goethe was to offer a response to Bacon that epitomised the Romantic counter-thrust to the Enlightenment’s scientific paradigm, observing wryly that “Nature will reveal nothing under torture.” 13
This breakdown of thinking involved a realignment of humankind with nature, and a reversal of the hierarchy, so that nature was presented as a mirror of humankind. Novalis,
10 For an account of the scientific basis of Romanticism, see Richards, 2002. 11 Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred. Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2004. 19. 12 Alice Kuzniar, ‘A Higher Langauge: Novalis on Communication with Animals’ in The German Quarterly Vol. 76 No. 4, Fall 2003. 427. 13 J.W. von Goethe Scientific Studies in Rigby, 2004. 19. 53 for instance, illustrates a model of man that might spontaneously transform into a natural phenomenon – be it plant, animal or even a stone.
One aspect of the sensory element of revelation in Romanticism is then to be found in this shift from the emergent atomisation that came with Enlightenment thinking towards a more interconnected way of being. Animals epitomised a heightened sensory engagement
– both literally and in their lack of deductive reason – thus the movement back into nature was central to a reconceived path of revelation that enabled the sensory to triumph over the rationality epitomised by the Kantian system. 14
The Romantic conception of the fragment mirrors a model of nature in which each part illustrates and engages the whole. The human subject, then, was coming to be seen as part of a vast ever-changing system, a system that was essentially irreducible. It is particularly in Schelling that the endless becoming and flux which characterises the fragment mirrors the flux of nature, and this irreducibility is explained in what he refers to as the ‘barbaric principle’ 15 —that kernel of primordiality which underlies all things and makes any absolute systematisation of nature impossible. We can only experience nature as an infinite becoming, an endless transformation which gains only the appearance of stability as we engage with one of its many points of development. There always remains this element which is beyond any system, beyond reason: not just the beginning of the system, or for that matter of the concept of nature, but, to borrow a phrase from Slavoj
Zizek, “the beginning of all beginnings.” 16
It is an attempt to approach such primordiality, to articulate a ‘first philosophy,’ which underlies the reconception of nature, philosophy, science and art as inextricably linked.
14 Kuzniar, 2003. 428-32. 15 F.W.J. Schelling The Ages of the World in Robert Vallier ‘Être Sauvage and the Barbaric Principle: Merleau-Ponty’s Reading of Schelling’ in Chiasmi #2. Paris, J. Vrin, 2000. 90. 16 Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder : An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London and New York, Verso, 1996. 13. 54 Besides the somewhat amplified and hyperbolic enunciations of this union in the fragments, there were more systematic attempts made to express it. Schelling’s System of
Transcendental Idealism , for example, directly attempted to marry philosophy and art, with Schelling describing art as the ‘Organ’ of philosophy. 17 At the time he was ensconced in Jena and engaged in a heavy exchange of ideas with the Schlegel brothers, as well as Novalis and Goethe, and this text shows a palpable cross-fertilisation: the attempt to represent the artwork, and poetry specifically, as the mouthpiece of philosophy in part reflects the influences of these poets.
Schelling also attempted such a union in his Gespräche über die Poesie , which was serialised in the Athenaeum . This link between nature, philosophy, science and art was not understood as abstract, but was rather a practical engagement by which the post-
Kantian world might be revealed. A unity with nature was one facet, then, in a model of revelation that foregrounded specific irreducible qualities. Its centrality to the model was found in sensory qualities that defied reduction, the very qualities which, in the Cartesian model, made it suspect as a source for truth. Within the sensory there existed the possibility of a direct presentation of the world, rather than the re-presentation of discourse, and nature was thus seen as a concrete point by which such ‘sensory’ truth might be revealed.
This was not simply a matter, then, of a thematic engagement with the natural environment, but was part of the underlying necessity of a ‘literary’ presentation of truth.
Nature contained a kernel of irreducibility, and the sublime moment evaded capture (was partly defined by such evasion). This unrepresentable of nature, this ‘natural negative,’ requires presentation via a corresponding textual negative—the irreducible of the text is thus seen to model that of the natural world.
17 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling System of Transcendental Idealism (1800) , trans. Peter Heath. Virginia, University of Virginia Press, 1997. 219. 55 Nature, Longing and Incompletion within the Romantic Text
Novalis’ ‘Hymns to the Night,’ a work of ‘hyper-Romantic’ longing, if the term can be forgiven, has nature as a central theme alongside a glorification of death, a theme also present in Goethe’s classic Romantic novel, The Sorrows of the Young Werther (1774). In
Goethe’s text, the protagonist is charmed by the beauty of nature and the simplicity of life in a small, fictional German town, Wahlheim. There he meets and falls in love with
Lotte, a beautiful local girl. Lotte is already engaged, however, and the book culminates with the two kissing and Werther’s subsequent suicide: if he cannot have the woman he loves, death is the only noble solution. It is significant that Werther’s transformation into a tragic Romantic figure comes with his move to a small rural town: Werther is overcome by nature and his place within it: “Every tree, every bush, is full of flowers; and one might wish himself transformed into a butterfly, to float about in this ocean of perfume, and find his whole existence in it.” 18 What is most significant here is the shift in how nature is conceived: man is seen to belong in nature, to find a place of reconciliation there, rather than nature belonging to man, as his domain of mastery and struggle.
One characteristic of the Romantic artwork which might, at least in part, be located within nature, is that there is an element of the physical world that dwells beyond its boundaries, one which might be accessed or experienced if the correct attitude to its revelation is adopted. In many of the later examples of German Romanticism, and the
English and French Romantic work that was to follow, we see an attempted transportation of the audience via a sensory envelopment. The text aims at a world between the visible and the invisible, an attempted suspension in the uncertain creative fluid of the artistic process itself. The writer aims to strip the created world of certain
18 Johanne Wolfgang Von Goethe The Sorrows of Young Werther. Montana, Kessinger, 2004. 2. 56 elements of its form, or bolster them, so that what is expressed is at once familiar and uncertain.
This is a very nature-bound transcendence, which is accessible through the artistic expression of extremes of emotion or states of being, or perhaps the expression of more general poetic insights. In the case of Novalis, for instance, it is the deaths of his young fiancée Sophie von Kuhn and his brother Erasmus, that provide the experiential impetus behind some of his better known work, and themes of death and resurrection persist in his writings, most explicitly in the poem Hymns to the Night. 19 This excerpt is from section
6, ‘Longing for Death’:
Into the bosom of the earth,
Out of the Light’s dominion,
Death’s pains are but a bursting forth,
Sign of glad departure.
Swift in the narrow little boat,
Swift to the heavenly shore we float.
Blessed be the everlasting Night,
And blessed the endless slumber.
We are heated by the day too bright,
And withered up with care. 20
‘Hymns to the Night’ offers a classically Romantic theme – a much longed for reconciliation of earth and heaven, nature and humankind. What strikes us first on
19 Margaret Mahony Stoljar, trans/ed. Novalis; Philosophical Writings. Albany, State University of New York, 1997. 3. 20 Novalis ‘Hymns to the night’ at http://io.com/~smith/novalis/index/html . A revision of : Rampolli: Growths from a Long-Planted Root: Being Translations, New and Old, Chiefly from the German . London, New York, Longman’s, Green, 1897. 57 reading this excerpt is the integration of the reader into the earth, which is representative not only of death but also of the natural world. Consistent with the Romantic critique of
Enlightenment rationality, the escape from ‘Light’s dominion’ might also be an escape from the ‘light’ of reason. An escape into earth is an escape into a holistic, pre-linguistic, sensory truth. We can see here why the rationality that is held up as the goal of philosophy by Kant is for the Romantics the end of this kind of transcendent experience: for them, a dimming of the ‘light’ of reason is a necessary element of revelation.
With truth seen in some respects as being revealed within nature, our engagement with the natural world is seen to offer a kind of primordial element of meaning – it speaks to us in a way that transcends logically-based discourse, offering itself to us as a kind of unification of the senses. Yet if we attempt to reduce these kinds of sensory experiences into an empirical representation that sense of the world is lost.
—What we have is only the Augenblick , the lighting flash of revelation—
Such truth is revealed by the sublime and other phenomena where cognition and sensory engagement are joined in moments of suspended meaning. Wallace Stevens, in his poem
‘Man Carrying Thing,’ writes:
The poem must resist the intelligence
Almost successfully. Illustration:
A brune figure in the winter evening resists
Identity. The thing he harries resists
The most necessitous sense. Accept them, then,
As secondary (parts not quite perceived
58 Of the obvious whole, uncertain particles
Of the certain solid, the primary free from doubt. 21
Stevens’ poem, which plays out a perceptual moment in which snowflakes model an insubstantial atomisation of thinking, yet in which the flash or realisation is still palpable, brings this thought into proximity: an undeniable whole, the parts of which cannot be grasped. That the parts should be ‘not quite perceived’ while the primary remains ‘free from doubt’ aptly describes the possibilities of Witz and sensory revelation. Truth takes on gestalt shapes, yet the fragments that contribute this outline are in themselves uncertain: that ‘the poem must resist the intelligence – almost successfully.’
It is within this ‘almost success,’ via the poem’s or artwork’s ‘incompletion,’ that the
Romantics see it engaging with the absolute, and it is for this that the work in progress illustrates the whole: what is described as “the infinite truth of the work.” 22 The fragment is then seen to point simultaneously to a void and a fullness: the absence of completion opening the work upon all other works . And so, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy argue, “it is in this not being there, this never yet being there, that romanticism and the fragment are, absolutely.”23 The fragments are thus seen to engage with a totality that is, in a sense, the totality of literature itself, an endless proliferation of styles that goes beyond the boundaries of the subject as a creator of the work. The fragment is seen to open upon a universal literature, and subsequently, a universal meaning: to transcend its boundaries because of its absence of boundaries, to offer a complete literature because of its absence of completion.
21 Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems . New York, Vintage, 1990. 350-1. 22 LA, 48. 23 ibid. 59 One of the principal ways in which the Romantics subverted literal meaning and propagated a multiplicity of possible interpretations was in the systematic use of irony.
This is, in particular, Friedrich Schlegel’s concept of irony, a form of (non-dialectical) philosophy that originates in Socratic irony, yet which goes beyond the inversion of literal meaning by which irony is normally conceived. Rather, Romantic irony is a negation that does not necessarily signpost the contrary of what is asserted. The intended function is to circumvent direct analysis, to distance language from its role in argumentation and deductive reasoning. Besides meaning itself, Romantic irony undermined the stability of convention – be it the rules of social interaction or poetic composition. For Friedrich Schlegel, such stability was a kind of prison, a “hideous logical strait-jacket,” 24 and the only means of escape was the destruction of the conventions which governed and restricted it: all stable structures were to be mocked, laughed at, blown up; any entrenched belief needed to be undermined. 25 Friedrich
Schlegel writes:
In this sort of irony, everything should be playful and serious, guilelessly open and deeply
hidden. It originates in the union of savoir vivre and scientific spirit, in the meeting of a
perfectly natural and perfectly artistic philosophy. It contains and arouses a feeling of
indissoluble conflict between the unconditional and the conditioned, between the
impossibility and the necessity of complete communication. 26
Irony represents something of the paradox at the heart of Romanticism: playful and serious, open and hidden, natural and artistic, and all revolving around the ‘impossibility and necessity of complete communication.’ In this quintessentially Romantic manoeuvre, we see the coming together of the theory of the work and the work itself in an ironic 24 Berlin, 2000. 117. 25 ibid. 26 Critical Fragment 108 in Critchley 1997. 114. 60 definition which enacts that which it purportedly describes. If we further stretch the metaphor from fragment 206, we might describe Romantic irony as the barbs that protrude from the hedgehog: their effect is to make the fragment ungraspable, to make its meaning impossible to ‘hold.’ The aim, then, is not the paradoxical for its own sake, but rather an expression of negativity which models a corresponding negativity within experience: the circumventing of an individual truth allowing the truth of the whole to appear. Irony is seen to create a distance between the writer and the world, the writer and the reader, the writer and any definitive offering or textual analysis – distinctions and limitations that might prevent engaging with whatever truth might be drawn from ‘the absolute.’
The intersection of different literary genres also enacts a textual destabilisation, and in some fragments we see a definite melding take place. In Athenaeum fragment 21, for example, philosophy and literature come together in a criticism of Kantian theory.
The Kantian philosophy resembles that forged letter which Maria puts in Malvolio’s way in
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. With the only difference that in Germany there are countless
philosophical Malvolios who tie their garters crossways, wear yellow stockings, and are
forever smiling madly. 27
The first thing that strikes us in this fragment is its playfulness, yet the intent is serious, cynical and cutting. The fragment represents the German people as victims of a false profession of love – but the forgery left by the character Maria, with the intention of ridiculing Malvolio, is the Kantian system itself. Kant’s philosophy is thus presented as false, a misrepresentation. The character Malvolio is egotistical, shallow and snobbish, and does not like Feste, the fool. This dislike is significant, as it shows him (and, in this context, Kantians) as lacking in the faculties of irony or play that are so important to the 27 Athenaeum Fragment 21 in Schlegel, 1991. 20. 61 Romantics and which this fragment foregrounds. Significantly, he remains the one unsatisfied character in Shakespeare’s play, duped and shown as foolish. In employing
Shakespearean drama in their critique, this fragment functions on a number of levels, dismissing Kantian theory as frivolous and worthy of ridicule, but maintaining an ironic distance within the criticism. The whole philosophical enterprise is thus set up as a form of theatre, with the fragment’s irony and sense of play granting a distance that makes it hard to criticise.
This fragment blurs lines of genre as well as understanding, so that philosophy, poetry and fiction join together in critique.
One can see then why there would be such antagonism directed towards the Kantian system, with its elevation of precise, rational discourse as the only system capable of explaining and delineating philosophical knowledge. The Romantics wanted to put all that certainty into question, to ask what really lay beyond and behind knowledge and what role language had to play in its representation. If the absolute was beyond the limits of logical discourse, yet remained palpable presence, glimpsed in momentary sublimity, then Romantic fragmentation and poetry needed to be an ever evolving gesture towards that absolute, a reference that points in the direction of this fleeting appearance with a fleeting hand of its own. So when Athenaeum fragment no. 116 writes of the “real essence” of Romantic poetry being “that it should forever never be perfected,” 28 besides drawing a distinction from the poetry of the past, which might now be analysed and characterised in full, what is identified is this Romantic imperative, the need for incompletion at the heart of the text: a textual opening upon the world by which the absolute might come to presence.
28 Fragment 31 in ibid., 32. 62 Irony, wit and fragmentation therefore became the central methods Romantic philosophy used to maintain language as an open place of potential as well as established meaning. It is by such distance that language was seen to ‘speak beyond itself.’ Although the Romantics did not put it in these terms, it might be argued from their perspective that within this avoidance of literal meaning, language does not complete the circle of signifier/signified and thus there remains the possibility of the absolute being opened by the play of signs: the system of signification being open to the world.
It’s worth emphasising the significant difference between the ethos of postmodern work and that of the Romantics. In the latter, the possibility of some form of reconciliation is kept open, at least in theory, by the form of the work. By contrast, postmodern literature generally denies the very possibility of reconciliation; it is, in fact, a question mark over the meaning of the idea, and indeed, of any such idea that would purport to engagement with an absolute ground. Although not necessarily postmodern,29
Beckett comes to mind at this point, with his wish that art would simply stop pretending a course upon “the plane of the feasible,” and retire, “weary of puny exploits, weary of pretending to be able.” 30 Romanticism’s wonder, its glorious naivety, is that the possibility of ‘being able’ was its very core; that it was naive cannot be argued, but this is not to say its vision is entirely misguided.
We are approaching the heart of the Romantic paradox: truth’s revelation and concealment in the coming together of determinate and indeterminate meaning, of system and anti-system, and by which such an absolute remains in some way attainable, yet not conceptually representable. Poetry’s orientation both within the system of language, and 29 Whether we position Beckett as a ‘late modernists’ or ‘early postmodernists’ is debatable. Regardless, as a departure from the perceived promise and hope of the Enlightenment, his inventive, bleak, minimalist theatre demonstrates many of the traits we will later identify in ‘postmodern’ literature, and he is definitively un-Romantic. 30 Samuel Beckett in Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’ in Styles of Radical Will . New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. 12. 63 its constant attempt to work beyond the system, is then conceived of as combining the finite elements of the world in such a way that they point beyond themselves, employing the finite object of art towards the representation of the infinite.
Breaks in meaning are imagined as spaces for new meaning, spaces, in a sense, for all meaning.
A collection of fragments does not need coherence, does not need to function as a collective , because their meaning is, in a sense, a whole fragmentary world of meaning.
The chaos of fragmentation is conceived of as a kind of unity because of this endless proliferation: we imagine a symmetry within such collectivity, because the system is one of endlessly shifting borders.
Novalis goes as far as to say that the semantic meaning of a poetic text is at best allegorical and at worst irrelevant. The words, he contends, should rather be taken as musical notes, in which certain elements of the world are combined in such a way that they constantly point beyond themselves: the finite system of signs is thus seen to touch infinity. 31 Truth as representation or correspondence was thus presented not only as problematic, but in some respects impossible. It was understood that the closed system of semantic meanings that philosophical language relied upon to establish its truths could only ever compare object with object, or representation with representation, leading into the kind of mise-en-abyme of self-referential, empty tautology that is explored in Jacobi.
Andrew Bowie sums up the Romantic problem and response as follows:
Language’s internal relationships make an articulated world possible, but even if the world
of things is also essentially a web of relations one cannot finally articulate a way of
mapping, in language, one set of relations on to the other, because that would entail a
31 Bowie, 1997. 69. 64 further web of relations, and so on... Novalis’ claim is that by engaging in the play of the
resources within this dynamic web of relationships one can reveal ‘truths’ that cannot
emerge if one wishes to define the relationships or find a grounding proposition. 32
What is at issue is a revelation of truth only available through creative discourse such as art and poetry, one which does not exist except through such articulation and which transcends the ability of philosophical disclosure, because within the Romantic model, philosophy is a closed system, and any closed system can only refer to itself. The fragment was seen as the literary form that was most capable of expressing the absolute nature of truth, of touching on the meeting point of language and world, because of its openness and play. However, the great Romantic project, the ‘literary absolute’ in the form of a great poem (most likely, in fact, a novel), a total book which would dispel the
Nihilism that threatened the post-Kantian philosophical enterprise, was never realised.
The fragments rather demonstrate Romanticism’s undoing: an inward spiral towards a theory that had little by way of practice. Romanticism effectively remains, then, “an art without works.” 33
Further, with this model of the fragment so heavily located in ideality, even the fragments that were written were said by Schlegel to in fact not be fragments in strict
Romantic sense, and he writes – with typical paradox, in a fragment – that “as yet no genre exists that is fragmentary both in form and content.” 34 The fragment, with its deep sense of paradox, its ambiguity, its completion and incompletion, its endless proliferation that spirals out into infinity, contains the seeds of its own impossibility, embodying in its self-definition the grounds of its own failure; just like Romanticism itself. It is for this reason that Critchley can argue: 32 ibid. 33 Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism , trans. G. Oakes. MIT, Cambridge MA, 1986. 15. Critchley, 1997. 94. 34 Athenaeum Fragment 77, in Critchley 1997. 110. 65
Romanticism does not exist, there is no such thing as romanticism, or a romantic work. All
the fragments offer is a practice of writing – a speculative, critical, interrogative, limitless
field or ensemble – that opens onto the promise of romanticism. This is what we might
think of with Blanchot as ‘the non-romantic essence of romanticism.’ 35
•
It is a difficult manoeuvre to reposition this consistent failure as an endless ‘becoming- success,’ yet this is so often the way in which Romanticism is read, and has been done so consistently over the past century. 36 In a sense, Romanticism’s failure to actually produce a Romantic work is the beginning of its achievement. As Jonathan Bate points out (with a typical Romantic metaphor), it is partly the adaptability of Romanticism, its ability to find new contours in new environments “like a fit Darwinian organism” 37 that has enabled it to be so successfully and so frequently re-examined and recontextualised. Jena
Romanticism offers little more than a coalescing of certain ideas, a new way of seeing, the fabrication of a new prism by which the world might be examined. That it is a way of thinking about a work, and remains so thoroughly incomplete as a work in and of itself, is part of what allows this endless re-contexualisation.
Romanticism is an opening up, a crystallisation, a hope: it is a knee-jerk to the birth- pains of a modernity that we continue to endure. And it is particularly the type of reaction that interests us here. The dissolving of philosophical ground that precipitated the
Romantic departure necessitated a ground that was not based in reason. The artwork is
35 Critchley 1997. 112. 36 Simon Critchley’s repositioning of Romantic fragmentation within the theme of finitude at the end of Chapter 2 of Very Little, Almost Nothing is particularly poignant. ibid., 138. 37 Jonathan Bate ‘Living with the Weather’ in Green Romanticism. ed. J. Bate. Special issue of Studies in Romanticism 55, no. 3, 1996. 433. 66 seen to reveal something new to the observer: the revelation of a truth that exists within the sensuous folds of the work itself.
What is it that occurs in our interaction with a poem or a painting? What is it that is understood when in close proximity to nature? What is it that overcomes us as this sense of the sublime? Romanticism’s claim is that such experiences offer us a kind of truth, that they reveal the absolute to us within the holistic encounter with the world. Such an encounter is unmediated , it is a sensory experience even should it be language which opens us upon it. Such truth is not reducible to a scientific explanation. Whatever ‘logic’ it contains, it contains it completely, barring the dissective precision which characterises
‘logical’ analysis.
In discovering ourselves at the limit of linguistic representation, in the space between the logical discourse of philosophy and the abstraction of the poem, we find ourselves in the gap between a word and what it represents, the rich ground between name and thing.
Here is the space between philosophy and art, and here is the continued relevance of the poem within philosophy: Romanticism positions us as looking deeply at the gap between a world that is present, raw and unmediated, and the representations of a consciousness that responds to this appearance of phenomena, that works away in a logic of symbols.
Lastly, one thing that might be added is that despite whatever impossibility we identify in the Romantic project, whatever insurmountable naivety lies at its heart, there also shines a kernel of truth.
—I rise from my desk and walk outside, and there it is, the late evening spiralling threads of light, the Victorian terraces and the trees, rooted in the earth and moving with the wind, and a parade of local people who wander along the pavement, intersecting with my life, my thoughts. This is what we have, this is the nature of our experience, and if we
67 search this scene for a meaning, if we seek within it a kind of revelation, then it most certainly offers us something. However, in attempting to explain or further define what this ‘sense of world’ is, this ‘something’ cannot be definitively reduced to a logico- discursive language, even to outline its vaguest contours.
No matter how we reinscribe the cultural elements of this experience, or reposition it in terms of the varying philosophical arguments through which it might be located
(phenomenology or aesthetics, for instance), this experience can be viewed as a contemporary moment of the Romantic departure: a desire to locate meaning within an irreducible yet fecund present. The central question is of how this ‘irreducible’ element of experience can be theoretically reinscribed or creatively represented, and again, there appears a kernel of truth in the Romantic solution, for what better way might there be to engage and demonstrate this moment than via the fragmentary, the open, the fleeting?
Romanticism begins in an impasse and ends in a suggestion of possibility. That a logic-bound discourse fails to articulate our world is a defining characteristic of the (post-
Romantic) theory of our epoch, and points to one of philosophy’s most significant failures: that it is precisely where the discipline seems to promise the most that its methodology breaks down – affirmations of ethics, for instance, or fundamental questions in ontology.
The following chapter will take this discussion into the work of Martin Heidegger, for whom irreducibility and the limits of logico-discursive philosophy become a central problem. How do we approach questions of Being? How do we think our originary opening on the world, on nature? What is the role of the artist? These are central points of inquiry for Heidegger, and some of the decisive characteristics of Heidegger’s approach echo that of Romanticism. For Heidegger, it is precisely the point at which a logically determined discourse fails that a potential solution presents itself, and both thematically
68 and stylistically, his work can be seen to turn on this fulcrum of failure and possibility.
Philosophy, for Heidegger also, must speak a language of negativity—the language of philosophy, the thinking of philosophy, must approach that of the poem.
69 70 3
Negative Foundations in
Martin Heidegger
To call Heidegger a Romantic philosopher is both right and wrong. In some obvious respects, the description is a good fit: Heidegger is deeply concerned with many questions that also motivated the Romantic project, writing extensively on the place of poetry in philosophy, the possibilities and problems of language, the philosophical role of art, and problems of Enlightenment rationality. There is an anticipatory ecological sensitivity in Heidegger’s work which locates him in proximity to a post-Romantic idea of nature, and there are also concrete links to the Romantics themselves, particularly
Schelling (to whom Heidegger devoted at least one substantial text).
Most importantly, some of the critical procedures employed by the Romantics are also found in Heidegger’s work – Heidegger frames his discussion via forms of expressive negativity, writing of the value of indirectly disclosive language in poetry and making extensive use of devices such as metaphor and paradox in delineating philosophical problems and apparent impasses.
Negativity has several distinct yet interlinked aspects for Heidegger, and we will examine each in turn. The first task in this chapter will be to locate Heidegger within the previous discussion and give a brief overview of his work and ‘guiding question.’ We will then look at negativity as it appears within the existential analytic of Being and Time.
The section following will discuss the emergence of negativity in the thinking of Being in
71 his later work, locating it in relation to what Heidegger sees as a necessary transformation in thought. Texts will be examined via theme rather than chronological appearance, although there will be a loose chronology in the transition from the earlier to the later work. Chapter 4, then, will outline Heidegger’s relationship to poetry, particularly its development in the later writings, and how this relates to forms of indirect disclosure and expressive negativity.
Poetry is central to Heidegger’s philosophy in several respects, but it is also outside the
‘poetic’ that his approach to language echoes the Romantic tradition. Language is innately disclosive for Heidegger, and it is through language humankind is seen as
‘opening up a world.’ This is especially true in his later work, in which language is seen to occupy an increasingly central role in the revelation of Being. For Heidegger, the
Romantic idea that poetry and philosophy ‘should become one’ was more than mere rhetoric: although there is a distance between the thinker and the poet, it is the speech of the poet that is authentic speech, 1 and Heidegger is in many ways the epitome of the express Romantic belief that poetry is the ultimate “ teacher of (History) Mankind .” 2
Strategies of semantic ‘openness’ and indeterminacy were deployed with specific intent in Heidegger’s writing, as they were in that of the Romantics. This is not to say that
Heidegger systematically theorised textual fragmentation and absence in the same, or even a similar, manner to the Romantics. However, part of Heidegger’s concern was the same post-Kantian problematic of reason, which occluded the fundamental question of
Being in favour of the primacy of reason and the rational subject, and which pointed to a failure that was (at least in part) linguistic.
1 Gerald L. Bruns ‘Poetry as Reality: The Orpheus Myth and its Modern Counterparts’ in ELH, Vol. 37, No. 2, January, 1970. 271-2. 2 The so-called ‘Oldest System Program of German Idealism’ (1796) in Bowie, 1990. 265. 72 Kant was certainly not viewed by Heidegger as a Romantic thinker, yet Heidegger does valorise the role that Kant gives to the (transcendental) imagination, arguably giving it a somewhat more prominent role in Kant’s philosophy than Kant does himself.
In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics , Heidegger argues that ‘imagination’ is the
“root” of both the “stems” of knowledge, namely sensibility and understanding. 3 This leads, according to Heidegger, to Kant’s attempt to broach an understanding of the possibility of knowledge and experience in terms of the primacy of temporality. Indeed, for Heidegger, Kant’s theory of imagination is the first in Western philosophy to grasp our knowledge of Being in terms of ‘finitude’ – demonstrated by the limits that Kant ascribes to knowledge of appearances versus the “thing-in-itself,” the fact that ‘pure reason’ could not reach objects of experience except through pure intuitions of time and space, which in turn are dependent upon the finite limits laid down by imagination. As such, Heidegger credits Kant with the first modern attempt to interpret Being in terms of temporality, and, controversially, sees in Kant’s explication of the transcendental imagination a temporalising schematism that anticipates (yet falls short) of his own theory of temporality. 4
We will return to the subjects of finitude and temporality shortly. The current emphasis on the ‘linguistic failure’ that is isolated in Kant, to which the Romantics react, is central to Heidegger’s thought for a number of reasons, the most immediate being the prominent position he offers the ‘language of metaphysics’ in his withholding of the promised third
3 Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997. 97. 4 Richard Kearney Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998. 49. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1997. 248-9. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , trans. Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly. Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1997. 289. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time trans. John Macquarie and Edward Robinson. Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1962. 45-6. Henceforth cited as BT. 73 section of Being and Time. 5 It is partly in response to this failure of logico-discursive expression – still steeped in the modern metaphysics of the subject – that his work increasingly shifts towards indirectly disclosive language and poeticism; here a deepened belief in the expressive potential of different forms (and locations) of negativity comes to underpin how he understands his philosophical project, his path of thinking, overall.
Heideggerian negativity should then be understood in a variety of configurations, but it needs to be emphasised that this does not refer to Hegelian negativity 6 and any corresponding echoes within Heidegger’s work, but rather names some interlinked but distinct forms of generative, expressive or ‘present’ absence. Firstly, linguistic negativity refers to the modes of indirect disclosure which Heidegger employs within his work, a disclosure which is necessary because of the inability of language to adequately delineate concepts such as ‘Being’ or, for that matter, ‘language.’ Such negativity takes various forms, from the direct ‘crossing out’ of the word Being to indicate its failure to signify 7 – writing, so to speak, ‘under erasure,’ which Jacques Derrida will adopt and (improperly) appropriate, 8 into more directly ‘poetic’ expression – metaphor, pun, rhyme and the general ‘indirectness’ epitomised, in particular, by his later work. Phrases such as:
“Because these more venturesome ones venture Being itself and therefore dare to venture
5 He writes: “The [third division] was held back because thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning [ Kehre ] and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics.” Martin Heidegger, ‘The Letter on Humanism’ in Basic Writings. London, Routledge, 2002. 231. Henceforth cited as LH. 6 See BT 484-6. Robert Sinnerbrink ‘ Sein und Geist : Heidegger’s Confrontation with Hegel’s Phenomenology ’ in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy , vol. 3, Nos. 2-3, 2007. 135-6. Heidegger also writes directly on Hegelian negativity in ‘Die Negativität’ in GA 68 Hegel. Ed. Ingrid Schüßler Schüssler. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann, 1993. So far as I know, this text remains untranslated. 7 And concurrent necessity – the word, after all, is let stand. This ‘crossing out’ is also meant to indicate the ‘four regions of the fourfold’ – earth/sky, mortals/gods. See Martin Heidegger, The Question of Being trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde, bilingual edition. New York, College and University Press, 1958. 81, 310-311. Also: Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002. 16. Henceforth cited as HLP. 8 See Jacques Derrida, Of Gramatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1997. 19. 74 into language, the province of Being, they are the sayers,” 9 exhibit a poetic ‘imprecision’ which for Heidegger carries an exactitude of its own.
In some respects founding the indirect disclosure of such expressive negativity is the innate negativity of Being itself: its very character, for Heidegger, conceals and reveals itself simultaneously. Further, the human condition, Dasein in the language of Being and
Time , is permeated by finitude: the negativity of non-being which defines human existence. The position taken here is that for Heidegger the innate negativity of Being and existence can be disclosed via language, but that it cannot be disclosed directly. There is a relationship between the underlying negativity of Being, understood as its concealing and withdrawal, and the expressive negativity of indirectly disclosive language.
Heidegger’s turning, the Kehre , can be read as a movement towards such modes of indirect discourse, and Heidegger’s movement away from the thought-structures of Being and Time is intended to enact a distance from metaphysics itself and the problems of truth’s re-presentation within the language of metaphysics, in order to employ an expressive form capable of disclosing Being.
Calculative Thought and The Principle of Reason
In The Principle of Reason [Der Satz vom Grund ], Heidegger outlines the principle originating in Leibniz – “nihil est sine ratione ”: “nothing is without reason.” 10 In German
‘der Satz’ means not only ‘the principle’ but also ‘the sentence,’ which emphasises the linguistic aspect of these reflections, and means that the principle should thus also be
9 WPF, 134. 10 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason. Bloomington and Indiana, Indiana University Press, 1996. 3. Henceforth cited as PR. 75 understood as a grounding sentence .11 This text systematically explores Leibniz’s principle across a variety of linguistic emphases, drawing from them a series of possible meanings. Part of this shift from one meaning to the next is achieved via Heidegger’s adjustment of our way of ‘hearing,’ so that our initial reading, which runs ‘ nothing is without reason’ comes to ring ‘nothing is without reason .’
In this manner, in the emphasis of the ‘is’ (in the principle’s original Latin, ‘est’ as a third person present conjugation of ‘sum,’ which translates in English as the verb ‘to be’),
Heidegger makes the principle speak of Being .
This kind of shift is typical of the later Heidegger’s approach, and the focus on etymology and its implications on the contemporary understandings and implications of words and concepts inherited from the metaphysical tradition is essential to his mode of doing philosophy. One possibility that will be explored in the following chapter is that this kind of etymological emphasis might be seen to correspond functionally to certain
Romantic theoretical inflections. In the case of ‘the principle,’ once this connection is established, Heidegger traces implications of the principle to modern technology, to scientific discourse, and perhaps most importantly, to the scientific thinking of our age.
Part of his argument here is that the principle becomes totalising: the problem then is not the principle per se , but that it, and the ‘calculative’ model of thought that stems from it, conceals a more originary thinking, and a more originary relationship with truth.
The principle now says that every thing counts as existing when and only when it has been
securely established as a calculable object for cognition. ... today humanity runs the risk of
11 In fact, there are other emphases brought out of ‘der Satz ,’ among them ‘proposition,’ ‘leap’ and ‘movement.’ Grund should also be understood, beyond ‘reason,’ in the sense of ‘ground’ and ‘foundation.’ Heidegger emphasises, however, that these other meanings should be understood as inflections, and should not supplant ‘principle’ and ‘reason’ but rather allow us to hear them with a different accentuation. See: PR , 12. 76 measuring the greatness of everything grand only according to the reach of the authority of
the principium rationis .12
We will look at this in more detail below, but for the moment what I would like to emphasise is the way in which certain key Heideggerian concepts coalesce in the lead-up to this criticism: reason, thinking and being (/ Being ) are brought together here with this characteristic linguistic weighting.
In this case, such an emphasis takes the form of ‘listening’ to the principle’s changing tonalities, the changes by which we ‘hear’ Being’s echo in a subtle shift in accentuation.
The importance of this shift is underscored by the German play between hoeren (hearing) and gehoeren (belonging): under such an emphasis, in our ‘hearing’ of the call of Being, we belong to Being.
This shifting accentuation, the way it highlights the fluctuations of meaning within a largely voiced 13 mode of language, hints at the priority that Heidegger wants to offer spoken philosophy, writing at one point that Socrates is “the purest thinker of the West” because he “wrote nothing.” 14 One comment that must be made here is that it is precisely this kind of ‘nostalgia’ for the purity of speech, for an ‘originary word,’ which forms the crucial phalanx of Derrida’s attack on Heidegger: the assignment of “the origin of truth in general to the logos: the history of the truth of truth,” he writes, “has always been . . . the debasement of writing, and its repression outside “full” speech.” 15 Further, placing
12 PR, 120-21. 13 That is to say, literally voiced: the way a word can be emphasised within speech patterns, and the resultant alteration in meaning: Heidegger’s emphasis here is one of intonation and the shift one of hearing. 14 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking. Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York, Harper Collins/Perennial, 2004. 17. 15 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology , trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London, John Hopkins University Press, 1997. 3. 77 Derrida’s objections to the side for one moment, in the light of Heidegger’s extensive publications, this comment strikes us as strange even from his own perspective.
It is worth remembering, however, that Heidegger was first and foremost a teacher , and that this comment comes within a series of lectures entitled What is Called Thinking.
This is important: there is a level of performativity in the lectures that Derrida perhaps misses. This text, and others of the same nature, can be read as ‘spoken dialogues’ that are intended to open up the question of speech versus writing .
Reading Heidegger in these terms is to see him offering a productive ‘performative contradiction,’ what is perhaps a deliberate provocation or paradox, which contextualises this ambiguous line of argument. Similar claims are not made, for instance, within Being and Time , or Contributions to Philosophy , or even the later poetic texts such as ‘What are
Poets For?.’ Despite their ambiguities and paradoxes, and perhaps because of them, these texts perform a pedagogical function that distinguishes them from Heidegger’s other works.
The thinking of What is Called Thinking needs to be understood as an act of being drawn into a kind of ‘draft of what is withdrawing’ – “All through his life and right into his death, Socrates did nothing else than place himself into this draft, this current, and maintain himself in it.” 16 This metaphor of withdrawal helps us to understand
Heidegger’s intent here and is a central motif: what Heidegger seeks withdraws even as it appears. The post-metaphysical thought he is chasing in What is Called Thinking is the thought that might follow such withdrawal. The foregrounding of the spoken word, of a language that is constantly ‘in play,’ might then be read in the terms of a thinking which
16 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking. Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York, Harper Collins/Perennial, 2004. 17. 78 might ‘actively’ follow such withdrawal. Thinking as a representative exercise, as a thinking of presence, will always fail in the face of such withdrawal.
Such an idea of thought provides a tangible contrast to the kind of ‘calculable’ thought which we find in The Principle of Reason – “the difference between mere calculative thinking and reflective thinking.” 17 Heidegger’s idea of thinking is not calculative, and indeed, it should not be understood in the narrow sense of representation, or for that matter as an ‘activity’ or psychological process at all. Rather, thinking here is the post- metaphysical proximity to that which is withdrawing, the successor to metaphysics
(which represents beings but forgets Being) which might rethink the relation between being and Beings.
The nature of this contrast, between ‘draft’ and ‘calculation,’ offers an interesting imagistic representation of Heideggerian models of thought, and we might recognise a potential impasse between these two very different representations of what, exactly, thinking is . Responding to Otto Hahn’s text We Will Live Through Atoms, Heidegger questions the future of a thinking driven entirely by the principle, and enters into an explicit critique of the scientism of the “atomic age.” Interestingly, it is to Goethe that he is drawn in this discussion, finding in verse 18 a critique of a research pattern which
“exhausts humanity and earth in their innermost essence.” 19 It is this post-metaphysical thought which is at stake here: a form of reflection more primordial than what the
17 PR, 122. 18 The translation of Goethe reads: But research strives and rings, never tiring, After the law, the reason why and how. Goethe, “Chinesisch-Deutsche Jahres- und Tageszeiten,” in Werke , Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Turnz. 1:389. in PR, 123. 19 PR, 123. 79 principle of reason affords, which, in keeping with one of the basic tenets of phenomenology, provides a hidden, abyssal ‘ground’ for the discourse of reason.
This opposition to ‘calculability’ offers an explicit connection to a Romantic paradigm: the inability to articulate certain ‘truths’ within a strictly calculative logico-discursive language. Romanticism presented the post-Kantian problematic of the limits of reason within a sporadic, if enormously interesting, series of largely unfinished and deliberately fragmented writings, the kernel of which was a movement away from logico-discursive writing practices.
Heidegger follows a similar trajectory, yet for him the movement is motivated and framed by a diverse and sustained ontological inquiry, at the centre of which is the question of post-metaphysical thought and how it might be linguistically presented. How, that is, can one think Being [ das Sein ] as distinct from beings or ‘what is’ [das Seiende ]?
Indeed, is there “a unifying sense of being that underlies the many ways – or senses – in which things make themselves manifest to us?” 20
Questioning Being
The attempt made in the closing paragraphs of the previous chapter to find a relationship with Romanticism through engaging with a phenomenological
‘everydayness’ finds a parallel within Heidegger’s inquiry. Heidegger wants to take philosophy back into lived life: to show, as Miguel de Beistegui puts it, that “life is never better served, that is, understood, and so intensified, than in philosophy, how philosophy
20 Miguel de Beistegui The New Heidegger. London and New York, Continuum, 2005. 60. Henceforth cited as NH. 80 is concerned with life itself – and nothing else.” 21 Philosophy’s failure to adequately address the question of Being, what the opening sentence of Being and Time refers to as the ‘forgetting’ of the question, is the underlying cause of what Heidegger perceives to be the simultaneous self-fulfilment and failure of the metaphysical project, and the ultimate failure of philosophy itself. Heidegger seeks a transformative retrieval of this question: a retrieval which begins within an analysis of ‘everyday’ being. Rather than addressing the question of Being itself, Being and Time is a preliminary inquiry – an existential analytic of Dasein – that will prepare the ground for the question of Being as such.
For Heidegger, this question has guided Western thinking since its inception, yet our way of asking it, the path that its thinking has followed, has led to our estrangement from the question and from Being. This estrangement began when thinkers (from Plato onwards) sought an answer to the question of Being as something ‘enduring in things,’ thinking of Being as a substance dwelling in things and ignoring the conditions by which things might intelligibly show up in the first place .
This question of the world’s intelligibility, its opening up as a meaningful world, was a central point of inquiry for Heidegger, and called for an analysis of those beings that were capable of understanding Being and their own Being – that is to say, human beings. The result was an exploration of the meaning of human being – what he referred to as Dasein
(an ordinary German word for ‘existence’ which also literally translates as ‘being there’)
– within its everyday world of practical concerns. Such ‘everydayness’ was instrumental to the inquiry, and Heidegger writes: “So far as existence is the determining character of
Dasein, the ontological analytic of this entity always requires that existentiality be considered beforehand.” 22 Dasein is understood as ‘being-in-the-world,’ with this
21 ibid., 25. 22 BT, 33. 81 hyphenation indicating that Dasein, self and world are a unity. 23 It was then via this exploration of this ‘worldliness,’ the being of everyday being in a world, that Heidegger hoped to reveal underlying ontological structures comprising ‘existence’ [ Existenz ] –
Dasein’s own way of Being.
Heidegger’s discussion differentiates between an inquiry into beings [ Seiende ] and an inquiry into Being [ Sein ], and it is the attempt to persistently question the meaning of this difference which remains the task of greatest concern for him.
The former, what is usually translated as ‘beings,’ essentially asks after ‘presence,’ the presence of beings or of ‘that which is.’ This refers to the existential or ontic dimension of Dasein’s existence, and corresponds to the concept of ‘world’ in some of Heidegger’s discussion. Although notoriously enigmatic, Heidegger’s talk of Being [das Sein ], as
Julian Young notes, arguably has two primary significations. 24 In the first sense, it means coming into presence, it is the horizon by which the world is disclosed, of what
Heidegger calls ‘the clearing’ [ Lichtung ] of Being .25 However, it encompasses more than this, signifying also that which remains concealed, thus indicating unintelligibility as much as intelligibility. The idea of a ‘clearing’ makes sense only within this twofold understanding of Sein as both revealing and concealing.
Being is thus an interplay of concealed and unconcealed.
As an inquiry into Being, rather than into beings, Heidegger is asking after ‘the clearing’ itself, and after the unconcealed which remains the ‘background’ of the clearing. This is quite different from inquiring, metaphysically, into the (unconcealed) beings or entities which show up within this ‘clearing.’ 23 Robert J. Dostal ‘Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger’ in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 155. 24 HLP, 10-25. 25 BT, 171. 82 Borrowing a metaphor from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in ‘What are Poets
For?,’ Heidegger compares our sense of Being to a glimpse of the glowing disc of moon which lights the night sky, revealing to us its lightened side, but by its nature keeping one side hidden. 26 We engage Being like we engage the glowing disc of moon: which is to engage the interplay of visible and invisible, concealment and unconcealment, whereby each is dependent upon the other: “presence conceals itself,” Heidegger writes, “. . . it is itself already absence. . . . Even those sides of life that are averted from us must, insofar as they are, be taken positively .” 27
This final clause is important, as it establishes the importance of positive negativities within Heidegger’s discussion: that which is concealed might still be taken positively despite its apparent absence, its mystery.
Merleau-Ponty will engage a similar discussion as one of sensory engagement, particularly in terms of sight and vision, but for Heidegger this obscurity specifically demonstrates the essence of Being itself, as that which simultaneously conceals and reveals, which offers itself and hides concurrently. The central question of this thesis, and a fundamental question in Heidegger’s inquiry, is the means by which such negative phenomena might be articulated.
What kind of expression, of presentation or re-presentation, might show that which is not, in any concretely palpable sense, present? What possibilities of questioning might approach that which is, by its very nature, partially concealed? For Heidegger, Being definitively defies re-presentation. We can see, therefore, why he would reject the kinds of calculative approaches to language which are epitomised by ‘the principle’ (of reason): what if something is not a ‘calculable object for cognition’ yet is still, in some way, present? Indeed, what is the very happening of presence? 26 WPF, 121. See also HLP, 14. 27 WPF, 91, 122. My emphasis. 83 Dasein’s Negativity
In Dasein there is undeniably a constant ‘lack of totality’ which
finds an end with death.
Being and Time 28
The opening pages of Being and Time offer significant clues as to the manner and substance of what is to follow. Heidegger dedicates the work to Edmund Husserl, but what follows this dedication is perhaps more telling: “Todtnauberg in Baden, Black
Forest.” 29 Beyond a statement of physical place, this inscription positions Heidegger within the land, within nature, and might also be seen to locate him in some respects
‘outside’ the system, the book coming to be not within the academy, but rather within a mountain hut in the forest. 30 A citation of Plato’s Sophist begins the text proper: “For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression
‘being.’ We, however, who used to think we understood it, have now become perplexed.” 31
This foregrounding Heidegger both supports and extends.
Before we begin to read the introduction, then, we find this text positioned in interesting ways: here is a philosopher positioned within nature, calling, through the lens of phenomenology, to awaken the most originary, primordial of questions: what does it mean for us to be, and further, what is the meaning of the question itself? Part of the
28 BT, 286. 29 ibid., 5. 30 Locale is extremely important in Heidegger’s work, but is the subject for a separate study. For a thorough discussion of the subject of ‘place,’ see Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2006. For a more intimate sense of Heidegger’s hut and its location, see Adam Sharr’s beautiful little book Heidegger’s Hut. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2006. 31 BT, xix. 84 significant shift Being and Time represents is the way in which it positions Dasein’s self- understanding, its opening upon Being, via what it discovers within its environment, and thus within a specific historical attunement: our way of being, our opening upon Being, is structured by our historicity.
What is of most interest to us in the present discussion, however, is the way in which
Heidegger’s structuring of Dasein positions it through distinct and fundamental forms of existential negativity. We, as human beings, are never quite complete, and this incompletion extends to the very core of us: Dasein is always both more and less than what it is, always opening upon possibilities and watching others disappear, constantly dangling over an abyss of finitude and non-being, tantalisingly open upon a sense of
Being that immerses us in its plenitude yet evades any definitive attempt at representation.
Being and Time recasts Dasein through several forms of absence and lack, and although such negativity has numerous manifestations, it is structured most clearly and primordially via the phenomenon of temporality.
Although there is not the space in this context to rigorously explore Being and Time as a whole, it is necessary to provide a sketch of how Heidegger understands our ‘being in the world’ and what this means to our larger discussion of negativity. According to the extensive analysis elaborated throughout the two divisions of Being and Time , time is the horizon of the Being of Dasein; as Heidegger writes, “ the central problematic of all ontology is rooted in the phenomenon of time .” 32 In order to experience time in the everyday sense, of yesterdays and tomorrows, we require a more radical ‘opening’ on time, an opening on a temporality which does not correspond with this normal ‘vulgar’
32 ibid., 40. 85 understanding of ‘time.’ 33 Temporality is the underlying nature of our being in the world, our primordial foundation. It is our ability to renew and transform: just learning a language, in this expanded sense, is a temporalised action, having to do with an opening upon the future. The temporal character of Dasein means that time itself is explored through Dasein and that the temporal nature of Being might be approached via Dasein’s temporality.
The first half of Being and Time gives a formal analysis of Dasein’s existence by exploring its everyday relations with the world. This relationship is interpreted phenomenologically via a series of significant ‘existential categories’ which structure what Heidegger refers to as our ‘being-in-the-world.’
In Division One, Heidegger sets out these ‘existentials’ in order to show the primordial structure of Dasein’s Being understood as existence. 34 Although these aspects are phenomenally separable, in Dasein they form a unity. The first such structure is
Befindlichkeit which can be rendered as ‘affectedness’: 35 this can be loosely described as what makes possible our mood, or our ‘Being-attuned.’ 36 Mood can be understood here, in the first instance, in its everyday sense – that we might be bored, or excited, or frustrated. Such an ‘affectedness’ always has an ‘understanding’ [ Verstand ], and this is outlined as the next basic mode of Dasein’s Being. What Heidegger means by understanding, though, isn’t just a kind of ‘cognising’ – that we might “understand this but not that” in a theoretical or abstract sense. This is rather a primary mode of Dasein’s
33 ibid., 352. 34 ibid., 169. 35 The Macquarrie and Robinson translation for Heidegger’s neologism ‘ Befindlichkeit ’ is ‘state-of-mind’. This has been sharply criticised, so I’m going to follow Dreyfus’s suggestion of ‘Affectedness,’ which does not carry the same connotations of a mental state – “a determinate condition of an isolable, occurrent subject” – an understanding of Befindlichkeit that Heidegger himself dispels. See Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being- in-the-world: a Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I . Cambridge, MIT Press, 1991. 168. 36 BT, 172. 86 being-in-the-world, and refers to the everyday familiarity with beings towards which we comport ourselves in various meaningful and involved ways. This practically engaged,
‘everyday’ sense of ‘understanding’ must therefore be viewed as derived from the primary structure of Dasein as understanding.
Importantly, this primary understanding is considered in terms of a disclosure as well as a ‘projection’ of Dasein’s meaningful possibilities for thought and action. Such projection is not a ‘thinking about the future’ in any everyday sense of the term, but is the way in which Dasein understands itself practically in terms of its available possibilities – not, that is, as a choice between, say, going out on the weekend or staying home, but rather as the way in which Dasein “ is its possibilities as possibilities.” 37
We come to see therefore the primordial nature of temporality for Heidegger, and understand the way that Dasein’s way of being is in some sense exterior to its concrete existence, inasmuch as its way of being is always this pressing into possibilities that it has disclosed and projected. Dasein’s present is constantly defined by futural projection against a historically disclosed background of available possibilities, and in this sense it can be said to be ‘beside itself’ as a temporally projecting being. Heidegger refers to this as being ‘never present-at-hand.’ 38 We will term this kind exteriority, the expression of that which is beyond the concrete aspect of Dasein, yet still characteristic of it, a mode of
Dasein’s ‘existential negativity.’
We discover and existential negativity, then, in Dasein’s way of locating itself in some respects beyond itself, its state of being other than what it is.
Heidegger goes on to specify several more existential categories. Rede , which is translated as ‘discourse’ or ‘talk,’ is offered as Dasein’s fundamental linguistic structure, 37 ibid., 185. 38 ibid., 184. 87 the way in which what is intelligible is articulated. 39 The existential negativity resulting from Dasein’s ‘projection’ is further grounded by Heidegger through such ‘discourse,’ which is the expression of Dasein’s state of being ‘outside’ of itself that is a part of
‘understanding’ – language, then, does not create this state, but it is language which expresses the exteriorisation of Dasein that results from the state of ‘understanding’ itself and the relational whole of equipmental items and various other kinds of beings within which it finds itself. (In subsequent chapters, Merleau-Ponty will frame a similar thought to do with the ‘transcendent’ nature of communication.) Heidegger’s view of language will shift significantly as his thinking develops, but in Being and Time language is seen to have its roots in “the existential constitution of Dasein’s disclosedness”: “The existential- ontological foundation of language is discourse or talk. ”40 This is not the tautology is might appear to be, but needs to be seen to give language a contextual grounding in the pre-linguistic articulations of a being that is engaged in intelligible relations with other beings and things, a grounding in everyday discourse as ‘asserting’ or ‘refusing’ or
‘demanding’ or ‘warning’ or any other manifestations of utterance. 41
Two further structures are given that express Dasein’s character as being caught up in everyday concerns, namely what Heidegger describes as ‘idle talk,’ ‘curiosity’ and
‘ambiguity.’ 42 These are essentially deficient modes of discourse and understanding, and identify Dasein’s tendency to become absorbed in the practical world with which it is concerned.
This state is defined as Dasein’s state of “Being-lost in the publicness of the “they”,” 43 and is given the term ‘fallenness’ or ‘falling.’ Although there is an ethical interpretation
39 ibid., 203-4. 40 ibid., 203. 41 ibid., 204. 42 ibid., 219. 43 ibid., 220. 88 apparent here, Heidegger steers us away from understanding fallenness in ‘disparaging’ terms: rather, despite being understood in terms of ‘inauthenticity,’ such fallenness signifies the way in which Dasein comports itself towards its ‘practical’ relations, that it is “proximally and for the most part alongside the world in its concerns.” 44 Such falling is in fact for Dasein “an essential way of being-in-the-world.” 45
The effect of such fallenness, however, is the ontological misrepresentation of Dasein to itself in terms of objective presence [ Vorhandensein ]. These ‘inauthentic’ modes of being effectively conceal from Dasein its fundamental ‘groundlessness’ – its thrownness and finitude. This, though, is the point: our falling is “reassuring and tranquillizing” 46 – it makes life easier to bear.
It is within these inauthentic modes of being that the primordial totality of Dasein comes to be revealed as ‘care.’ Dasein is ‘thrown’ into the world, ‘abandoned’ to the world, and responds by ‘fleeing’ its fate in its absorption within everyday concerns.
Dasein faces this thrownness, this abandonment, with ‘care’ – one might say that it
‘cares’ about its fate. Care, however, should not be understood simply as worry or pragmatic concerns, but rather the ‘caring’ of Dasein as its underlying ontological structure; that, as Heidegger expressed it in conversation with, Hubert Dreyfus, Sein geht mich an – that ‘being gets to me.’ The ontic modes of caring, the everyday ‘tribulations’ and the ‘cares of life,’ should therefore be thought of as arriving from what is an essential ontological mode of Dasein’s Being. 47 It is the degree to which Dasein flees from its thrownness and finitude into such inauthenticity that we understand it as thrown and see its ‘care structure’ revealed in the phenomena of anxiety, guilt/responsibility and so on.
44 ibid., 220. 45 NH, 19. 46 ibid., 18. 47 Dreyfus. 1991. 238-9. 89 Care illustrates further the existential negativity of Dasein. In ‘care,’ we see the unifying characteristic of Dasein as Dasein’s state of being essentially “ahead of itself .”48
The analysis of Care comes within Division Two, in which the existential structures outlined in Division One are given their appropriate temporal characterisation in terms of the various ‘ecstases’ of temporality, and subsequently reinterpreted at a deeper, more originary ontological level. Ekstasis is the act of ‘standing out,’ and this way of describing Dasein’s relationship to time emphasises the way that it comports itself in a manner that is ‘outside-of-itself’ and outside of the passage of ‘present moments.’
Existence is ecstatic: Dasein is always in some sense both within and beyond its concrete situatedness in a deeply temporal manner.
The principal structure of care is its temporal-projecting nature: so, with Dasein being understood in terms of care, and care being understood in terms of temporality, we come to understand Dasein as a temporal unity that is ‘ecstatically’ ‘outside of itself.’ 49
Beyond the ecstatic nature of Dasein’s temporal structure, the finitude of death is also seen to define Dasein, for Dasein’s state of ‘care’ is a care directed towards its own finitude. Put simply: life matters because it ends and because we are far from oblivious to this end. Our life is permeated at the deepest ontological level by death. We live as dying, as being-towards-death, as finite beings whose existence is groundless, whose every moment is defined by loss, contingency and chance, by an inability to master our
48 BT, 458. My emphasis. 49 This discussion of time is further extended in Heidegger’s text and lecture series Basic Problems of Phenomenology, which addresses the question which closes Being and Time : “Is there a way which leads from primordial time to the meaning of Being? ” (BT, 488) Although the text falls short as a treatment for this problem, his approach to Being through time does produce a shift in the way that time is conceptualised. Typical of Heidegger, this is accompanied by a shift in terminology: the German word for temporality, Zeitlichkeit , which he employs in Being and Time is replaced by the Latinate Temporalität, and we are thus to understand that the former refers to the temporality of Dasein, while the latter seems to correspond to the temporality of Being. The precise consequences of this shift, however, are not addressed. Robert J. Dostal ‘Time and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger’ in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 157. 90 situation. This is the more ontological meaning of our finitude as Dasein: that even within the midst of the appearance of solidity, of the most controlled life imaginable, we remain suspended over an abyss of non-being. It is this that causes Angst, a fear not of one thing or another, but of the void that ‘grounds’ our groundless being-in-the-world.
It is our flight from this finitude which leads to the compensatory interpretations of existence that dominate our everyday situation: the religious, metaphysical, even scientific explanations of our being which act as a salve to the anxiety of thrownness and the all-pervading nature of existence as finite, temporal beings. This is, again, the more ontolgical meaning of ‘care’: why our being-in-the-world matters to us and why we can characterise it as defined by an existential negativity. Further, our being-towards-death is also characterised by a fundamental incompletion. “As long as Da-sein is a being, it has never attained its “wholeness.” But if it does, this gain becomes the absolute loss of being-in-the-world.” 50 Our finitude, then, locates us via a radical incompletion: there is a fundamental inability of Dasein to experience itself as a totality, for the completion of experience only comes with the ending of experience.
Dasein’s fate, its thrownness , is of a being characterised by an exteriority to itself.
Both the formal structures of existence, as ‘care,’ and existence’s temporal nature, understood as ‘ecstatic,’ are viewed in terms of such exteriority, are understood as defined by an essential negativity. A further knot of absence, but on this occasion linking to a form of expressivity, is discovered within Heidegger’s discussion of conscience, within what Heidegger terms ‘the call of conscience,’ which is also described as ‘the call of care.’
Here Heidegger attempts to explicate the ‘existential-ontological’ conditions that make an ‘ordinary’ moral experience of responsibility possible, and the way Heidegger frames
50 BT, 219-20. 91 the analysis of this ‘conversation’ is intriguing. The call of conscience does not, for
Heidegger, come from God or from others: rather, Dasein is both caller and called .
The call is Dasein speaking to Dasein of itself, summoning it to itself. But if the call of conscience is, in crude terms, the self calling itself to account, how does this call go out?
What is its nature and content? Clearly, this is not an articulate cry, even an internal one
(in the sense of a monologue), and neither is it a direct call to one course of action or another; rather, it is a reorientation, a reminder of choice, of possibility, of responsibility in its most existential sense. So, what is spoken by the call? Heidegger asks. His answer is, “Strictly speaking – nothing.” What is uttered, we ask, in a call that says nothing?
“Conscience speaks solely and constantly in the mode of silence .” 51 This term—
“silence”—will become important in subsequent chapters, but for the moment let us note that a discourse of silence is not about beings, but is rather a discourse of Being.
The call of conscience is a summons to Dasein – a summons to its ‘ownmost quality’ of ontological lack. 52 Heidegger represents this call in terms of ‘ Schuld ’ or ‘guilt.’ Not to be confused with the Christian doctrine of original sin and not guilt in the psychological sense, ‘guilt’ can also be understood as connoting ‘indebtedness’ and ‘responsibility.’ 53 I am indebted for my existence – not just in the simple sense of an ontic ‘debt’ to my family for bringing me into being, but to the contingencies of culture and history, to the possibilities of language, of nature and Being.
The call of conscience calls me towards this responsibility, calls me to own up to my finitude; it calls me away from the illusion of mastery over my situation and over other beings. It calls us to acknowledge and therefore ‘take over’ our fundamental finitude – it does not choose a path or action, but perhaps we might liken it to the holding up of a
51 ibid., 252. 52 ibid., 249; notes, 409. 53 ibid., 325. 92 mirror to Dasein, reflecting, metaphorically, an image of Dasein on the existential plane, making Dasein aware of its place within action, choice, and time, calling Dasein “ahead of itself.” 54 In this, the call of conscience parallels the experience of Angst: that we experience Angst before our being-in-the-world as such and are confronted with our finitude, with our own ungroundedness as ‘thrown projects.’
We thus see Being and Time attempt to address a fundamental existential negativity, transforming and reframing the question through such ideas and structures as Angst, care, conscience and temporality.
One of the principal difficulties in addressing such negativity is that language is itself tied to representations of presence: how does one address, then, positively conceived absences? For Heidegger, such negativity is described through the ‘ecstatic’ nature of time, through Dasein’s state of being ‘outside’ of itself, as ‘silence’ and as ‘nothing.’ In later texts, ‘nothing’ becomes a central term by which Heidegger locates certain forms of negativity and comes to signify an underlying absence within Being itself. This understanding is deepened as Heidegger’s work progresses, and ‘the nothing’ comes to be central not only in this ontological sense, but also as a way of locating and framing a discussion of linguistic negativity: the necessity of a semantic and grammatical failure in the face of Being.
Although the forms of negativity we find in Heidegger, and his way of approaching and delimiting its problems, differs markedly from its articulation in Romanticism, this identification of fundamental negativity does support the validity of the Romantic project’s emphasis on negative or indirect forms of disclosure, and as we shall see, the linguistic negative of the nothing does find explicit parallel. The way this issue unfolds in
54 ibid., 252. 93 the writings of the Romantics is to do with the re-presentation of truth, and problems of such re-presentation point to a failure of philosophy to elucidate its own ground.
For the Romantics, such a failure might be addressed through forms of linguistic indeterminacy and indirection. Heidegger’s response will follow a similar trajectory.
However, as we have seen, Heidegger identifies fundamental existential elements as characterised and determined by negativity – it is not, that is, solely a question of a linguistic failure of the re-presentation of truth, as it was for the Romantics, but of a negativity dwelling within human existence itself .
Even should a language appear that might accurately construe existence, such a language would by necessity contain a fundamental negativity in order that it might respond and represent the various lacunae of Dasein. This existential negative has its origins within the ontological foundations of Dasein, thus any attempt to approach the question of Being necessarily becomes embroiled in the question of negativity even at a purely ontic level. Such origins are not fully developed in Being and Time , and we now turn to the more substantial ‘ontologisation’ of nothingness that occurs in Heidegger’s later texts.
Ontological Nothing
In 1929, upon his accession to the chair of philosophy at Freiburg University,
Heidegger presented his inaugural lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’ In this lecture, the mood of anxiety analysed in Being and Time is further explored, and the nothingness which it reveals becomes a central motif, with Heidegger enquiring directly: “How is it
94 with the nothing?” 55 What exactly Heidegger means by ‘the nothing’ is vividly reconceived in the description of childhood nightmares given by Miguel de Beistegui in the opening to his The New Heidegger . He dreams of being slowly but inevitably drawn into a void, an absence, which is either very dark or very bright. 56 The void swallows everything, a pure nothingness that even threatens to swallow the self, and which, despite offering no explicit threat (in fact, offering nothing at/as all ) is utterly terrifying. Here we understand how Anxiety can be seen to orient us to the Heideggerian abyss. One of the difficulties de Beistegui discovers, perhaps as disturbing as the dream itself, is the impossibility of articulating this void. While normally we think about nothingness in terms of absent presence – “there’s nothing happening,” for instance, demonstrating an absence of activity that is generally occurring – de Beistegui’s dream demonstrates an experience of nothing as itself.
It is this kind of nothingness that Heidegger is attempting to locate in his essay, and it is this problem of nothing’s representation, and what it means for the representation of other innate negativities , which is at the essay’s heart.
Searching out and explicating such negativities, such singular absences, goes counter to our methods of interrogation: to think, speak and write are to think and speak and write about something : thus “thinking, which is always essentially thinking about something, must act in a way contrary to its own essence when it thinks the nothing.” 57
With this in mind, the essay represents something of a beacon for the transformation in thought which Heidegger is searching for: thinking and language must be brought to bear upon absence, must be employed in a way contrary to their ‘essence’ in order to achieve
Heidegger’s ends—namely to think the question of Being. Further, not only does 55 ‘What is Metaphysics’ in Basic Writings, ed David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. 96. Henceforth cited as WM. 56 NH, 8-11. 57 WM, 97. 95 Heidegger centrally position the nothing within this essay – he states that it is only via the nothing that Being is visible to Dasein – that “Being itself is essentially finite and reveals itself only in the transcendence of Dasein which is held out into the nothing.” 58
In Hegel’s famous dictum Sein gleicht Nichts [being equals nothing], pure nothingness and pure Being are the same. For Hegel, however, Being and nothing are basic metaphysical categories, and it is their indeterminacy that leads to their equivalence. 59
This is a dialectical nothing – a vanishing point on the horizon of understanding. At the same time, however, these terms are opposed in general usage, and there is a difference between them; it is only that it cannot be articulated through these categories as such, but requires a transition to the category of becoming.
Although similarly oriented by a limit point, Heidegger’s bringing together of Being and Nothing 60 is not of the same origin. Being and Nothing are two sides of the same coin, as we saw earlier in Heidegger’s adoption of the Rilkean lunar metaphor and its symbolisation of the interplay between concealment and unconcealment. For Heidegger, therefore, Being equals Nothing because Being is the ‘clearing,’ 61 the opening by which things become visible or unconcealed; but it is also that which remains concealed.
The way Heidegger employs this metaphor of light, vision and spatiality demonstrates how he understands Being as an opening up of world for Dasein. In German, the term for clearing is Lichtung , which incorporates within it the word for light, Licht. Lichtung , however, refers specifically to a forest clearing, and it is interesting that this, one of
Heidegger’s principal metaphors, locates us so centrally within nature.
58 WM, 109. 59 G.W.F. Hegel Science of Logic trans. A.V. Miller . London, Routledge, 2004. 82. 60 Although not conventionally written as such, I will capitalise nothing from here on, both in order to emphasise the particularity of this usage, and to align it with Being. 61 BT, 401. 96 Yet this clearing, which names our most primordial phenomenological opening upon the world, itself orients us to negativity, implying a much larger darkness that is not visible, beyond what is cleared. It is this beyond that Heidegger describes as the Nothing.
It is a powerful symbol of Heidegger’s thinking, that within the metaphor of ‘clearing,’ what we see, what is ‘lit’ in order to be visible, is but a small portion of ‘what is,’ and that the beyond of our phenomenological opening is the vast generative ecosystem of the forest.
It becomes apparent, then, that Being is not Nothing in the sense of ‘absolutely nothing,’ but is ‘no thing’ – less absent presence than the presence of a definable absence, an absence of what may come, but which is a presence also, as ‘the quiet power of the possible’ 62 – like the palpable quiet of the trees that are beyond the lighted edge of a glade.
In the ‘Letter on Humanism,’ Heidegger comments that “our words möglich [possible] and Möglichkeit [possibility], under the dominance of “logic” and “metaphysics,” are thought solely in contrast to “actuality.””63 Within the logic of metaphysics, there is nothing beyond beings, as thinking this negative is impossible. Within metaphysical discourse, therefore, there is only what is apparent, with no articulation of mystery, beyond or origin: we are thus unavoidably cut off from the Being, for Being has negativities entwined within its structures.
It is for this reason that Heidegger equates metaphysics with nihilism, 64 for it disallows any inquiry into what is beyond beings. Concerning this linguistic question of
‘possibility,’ we must ask, then, how one linguistically delineates what is by definition
62 LH, 220. 63 ibid. 64 Martin Heidegger, ‘On the Question of Being’ in Pathways ed. W. McNeill. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998. 318. 97 ‘no-thing’? And in what way might we present a form of knowing that pushes beyond logic and metaphysics?
These are the central questions motivating the deliberate semantic ‘short circuit’ in the inquiry of ‘What is Metaphysics?’ Heidegger requires a way of thinking and speaking such absent presence that does not stand in opposition to the actual, to what is, but rather expresses the ambivalence of this relationship, expresses the negative or ‘abyssal’ ground of Being in positive terms.
We begin to see how our thinking and expressive engagement with negativity can come to be seen as a necessary component of any attempted explication of Being.
In the opening of ‘What is Metaphysics,’ Heidegger tells us that the question of the
Nothing is the question that science is incapable of asking. In a sense, it is a question of primordiality, of origins. How can science examine its own ground when it can only address what is present , especially when what is present is essentially represented by the terms given by science? We must engage the Nothing in order to discover the truth of
Being, but we cannot do so within the confines of scientific representation or logic, for they cannot function, as Heidegger terms it, contrary to their essence.
It is the nature of this question as a ‘formal impossibility’ that is seen to determine the need of another form of thinking. Facing a problem such as the Nothing, three viable alternatives are apparent: one can ignore it, denying its existence – the response we find in such systems as logical positivism, scientism and empiricism; one can acknowledge that a limit point is reached, but like Wittgenstein’s famous proposition at the close of the
Tractatus , state that “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence”; 65 or one can seek a mode of thought that searches out, in some way, the heart of this impossibility, and seeks a trace of meaning from this very unsayability. 65 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinnes. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961. Prop. 7. 151. 98 As Simon Critchley elegantly presents it, the first of these possibilities demonstrates the divide between the two schools of ‘Continental’ and ‘analytic’ philosophy, and demonstrates the two conceptions of the world and language that are at the centre of this inquiry. 66
Rudolf Carnap’s response to ‘What is Metaphysics’ is well known—his essay ‘The
Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language’ dismisses the nothing as illogical nonsense. 67 This outright dismissal is not necessarily because Heidegger is wrong, but because his way of inquiry, the propositions and questions by which he makes his way, are ‘meaningless’ – are ‘unverifiable’ by the standards that Carnap insists upon for valid knowledge. 68 But for Heidegger, Carnap’s analysis, being tied to (metaphysical) logic, could never address the question of Being: Carnap wanted philosophical questions to meet standards of scientific rigour, but Heidegger saw his question as beyond the scope of science and logic.
The Nothing was undeniable for Heidegger and its centrality to Being meant that it could not be greeted with silence if one was to resolutely face the question of Being. It is within the failure of philosophy to adequately address his problem, and his seeing within this specific instance of failure the miscarriage of philosophy in general, that leads
Heidegger to position the notion so centrally within his work.
In one way or another, much of his later work is an attempt to come to terms with this difficulty and discover what it means for thinking and expression in general. What became clear to Heidegger is that the ‘end of metaphysics’ and the complete forgetting of
Being mean that a post-metaphysical thinking of Being is required, a thinking which is
66 Simon Critchley Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. 90-8. 67 ‘The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language’ in A. J. Ayer, ed., Logical Positivism . Glencoe, The Free Press, 1959. 60-81. Translation of Carnap 1931. 68 Critchley, 2001. 100. 99 not subject to the same restrictions and is able to think such negative ground. This is not to say that Heidegger thought it possible to outline the Nothing with clarity and precision: a total re-presentation of Being and the Nothing remained impossible. This did not, however, preclude something vital being gained from a proximity to such questioning.
Questioning, for Heidegger, is definitive of Dasein – a being whose nature is to question Being – and has a philosophical value independent of any answers it might engender. 69
To question, to think, is to open oneself to the draft of Being: questioning is itself thus conceived of as a form of indirect disclosure. Questioning is an opening upon the possibility of something like Being disclosing itself, it is to look towards such disclosure without requiring a conclusion. Heidegger seems to see this as responding to ‘calculative’ or ‘representational’ modes of thinking 70 because it exists as an opening upon truth , rather than truth’s re-presentation.
This idea echoes the model of disclosure we find in Romanticism. For the Romantics, truth might be glimpsed, outlined in the brilliant glimmer of Witz , but it cannot be reduced to a system, it cannot be ‘calculated.’ In the brilliance of the flash, however, truth reveals itself; the essence of the Romantic work, then, is less the work itself, than its function as a spark by which ‘the infinite’ becomes visible. Like the act of questioning, the Romantic fragment is forever in a state of activity, operating via a sense of truth that is plural and processive.
In a similar way, Heidegger’s emphasis on questioning steers us in the direction of the artwork or poem, as in some respects, they themselves can be viewed as questions: there
69 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: (From Enowning) trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999. 3-15 . Henceforth cited by page as CTP. 70 “The thinking question of the truth of be-ing is the moment that carries the crossing. This moment can never be really fixed – and even less calculated.” ibid., 15. 100 is no absolute rule in art 71 but rather a kind of meeting, an opening up of interpretation, of possibility. The poem, especially more abstract contemporary poetic practice, can be read as an interpretive question, a question directed at the rules of signification, at polyphony and polysemy and their interplay with less pluralistic ideas of meaning.
We will look more directly at these concerns in the following chapter; for now, the emphasis is on how such ‘open’ forms of discourse and disclosure can be seen to offer a potential engagement with a negativity that, for Heidegger at least, is implicit in the human condition. Such negativity is the horizon of temporality which Heidegger explores in Being and Time ; it is language; it is thought itself; it is the Nothing—it is Being.
Beyond all else, in fact, it is Being, for this is the question which underpins all others;
Being and its relation to the fundamental negativity of the Nothing.
We begin to see Being anew, shaped in some way by its finitude: Being as the clearing and what is beyond; the Nothing as that beyond, that part of Being that is past the clearing’s dappled light, past the greyness and deep within the forest dark. This metaphor fails to grasp the dynamic quality of Being and its historicity, but such a failure itself might be instructive, for such dynamism directs us to the shift in terminology by which
Heidegger comes to delineate this ontological ground: das Ereignis .
71 By ‘absolute rule’ I mean that there are cultural (and perhaps sensory) conventions that are taken to define what the work is or should be in order to be ‘great,’ but that art is an endless process of challenging such conventions. 101 Ereignis
This term receives its fullest treatment in Contributions to Philosophy , although there is a sense in which all the later work is an attempt to ground the concept. Heidegger writes that
if one inquires into be-ing, the approach here is not from beings, i.e., from this and that
being respectively – and also not from beings as such in the whole – but rather the leap is
enacted into the truth (clearing and sheltering) of be-ing itself. 72
The question of be-ing ( Seyn ) is that question in which the meaning of Being is no longer understood metaphysically; that is, as a question about beings. 73 The truth of Being is the primordial way of Being, including all beings and their potentiality, but also the essential presencing or ‘sway’ of all things. This is not experienced ‘just like that,’ but rather “only in the momentariness of Dasein’s leap-ahead into [ Ereignis ].” 74
We see Heidegger’s realignment of the question, therefore, as more than a freeing from beings as presence, but as an alignment with a fleeting moment of activity, an event.
Being is the fleeting incandescence of the leap – again, there is a correspondence with the illuminating ‘flash’ of Romantic Witz . The Ereignis is this simultaneous happening of
Being giving itself, but at the same time drawing away: the event of the ‘clearing- concealing’ of Being. 75
Ereignis names Heidegger’s attempt to rethink the relationship between Being, beings, and human beings/Dasein; the disclosure of Being and the revealing of beings and the 72 CTP, 52-3. 73 ibid., 52. Note that Heidegger reverts here, as he does elsewhere in texts from the late 1930s, to an anachronistic spelling of Being (be-ing), Seyn , in order to emphasise that the truth of Being is here understood in terms of the history of Being. He drops this particular inflection in the1940s. 74 ibid. 75 HLP. 20-1, 25. 102 way Dasein is appropriated or mutually related and thereby brought ‘into its own’ through such a relationship. It expresses the way Being, beings and Dasein are essentially related and gathered together, a relationship expressed by the awkward English translation of Ereignis as ‘enowning’76 offered by the translators of Contributions to
Philosophy . We are, that is, ‘enowned’ by Being, which might be understood in the synonym Heidegger offers of Ereignis, namely the ‘event of appropriation’ 77 – Being
‘enowns’ us, appropriates us: claims us, in some way.
Ereignis delineates a concept that, according to Heidegger, is un-thought in Post-
Socratic Western philosophy, and is in fact unthinkable within that tradition because the latter can only think in terms of presence – the presence of beings. But neither Being nor the Ereignis are ‘present’ in the same way that an entity, or even language, are said to be present. Other forms of thinking, however – the poetic, for instance – can bring it into nearness, even though it remains conceptually ungraspable, for they are capable of illuminating the event itself in some way, without re-presenting it via conceptual schemata.78 The Ereignis , then, being at the core of Heidegger’s later thought, is one of the principal signposts that collocates a necessity for indirect modes of disclosure within ontological revelation.
76 Miguel de Beistegui discusses the rendering of ‘Ereignis’ as ‘Enowning,’ and the corresponding translation problems in texts from this period. Although there are significant difficulties in translating a writer like Heidegger, whose “German often feels foreign to a German ear,” the violence done to the English language by rendering Ereignis as ‘Enowning’ takes in beyond its capacity for sense-making. It “forces” the creation of a word that, even given the slippery and difficult standards of Heidegger’s texts, has no meaning and has no “way of making sense to an Anglophone ear.” Heidegger himself, as de Beistegui points out, considers Ereignis to be untranslatable; de Beistegui offers “event of ap-propriation,” but I’m going to leave it untranslated, principally because Heidegger scholars have been dealing with the word for so long now that, it seems to me, like Dasein, ‘ Ereignis ’ carries as much meaning to an Anglophone ear as might be gleaned from any difficult and complex translation. Further, with this in mind it seems justifiable to give in to the fact that Ereignis is an attractive word, with poetic qualities of its own, and, quite simply, is nice to have around. See: Miguel de Beistegui, review of Mindfulness (Besinnung) . Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. (2007. 04. 26) http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=9484 . 77 On Time and Being trans. J. Stambaugh. New York, Harper and Row, 1968. 19. 78 Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001. 25. Henceforth cited as HPA. 103 That it is an ‘event’ emphasises the historical element of such an unfolding, as well as the fleeting way in which it presences: the Ereignis is the singular event of the emergence of the horizon of the world, by which the clearing of Being opens up. That it is a ‘singular event’ emphasises that it is not an event in the way that, say, World War Two, or my holidays last summer, are considered as events, but is the endless ‘unfolding’ of the appropriation of Dasein.
Richard Polt emphasises Heidegger’s use of the verb ‘wesen’ (‘west’), which is translated as ‘essential unfolding’ – thus carrying with it connotations of the English
‘essence,’ but avoiding the static meaning of this noun. Miguel de Beistegui’s naming of
Ereignis as the “ recurrent event of being” 79 supports this dynamic emphasis. The connotation is therefore that this ‘essential unfolding’ might be glimpsed or felt by the process of attention; thus Heidegger makes the point: “ Das Seiende ist. Das Seyn west ,” 80 which might be translated as “ Beings are. Being presences [or eventuates].”
The awkwardness of translation, its malformation in a word like ‘enowning,’ disguises the fact that Ereignis is a normal German word for ‘happening’ or ‘event.’ The emphasis, though, is in the opposition between the static and dynamic , so we understand Dasein’s
‘leap ahead’ as that which orients it to the Ereignis , but an Ereignis that is neither the being, nor Being, nor the moment, but rather ‘truth,’ ‘presence,’ ‘presencing’ and ‘being’ coming together against a background of nothingness.
In naming Being via an event, a dynamic ‘relation,’ Ereignis bypasses the metaphysical emphasis on static presence.
Ereigni s, then, can be thought of as delineating a certain negativity, for as an expression of Being it is not considered in terms of substance – as a thing – but rather is a happening. Ereignis is never one single truth, never a substance, but is the singular 79 de Beistegui, 2007. 80 Richard Polt, Heidegger, An Introduction . New York, Cornell, 1999. 144-5. 104 historically disclosed clearing that eventuates in a unique configuration of
Being/being/Dasein. The slipperiness of such a formulation shows, however, that the difficulties we find in orienting ourselves to Being and Nothing do not go away with the introduction of a concept like the Ereignis , and Heidegger’s constant shift in terminology demonstrate this.
This constant transformation in language might be understood in terms of the
‘lightning flash’ nature of the revelation Heidegger is searching for. He seems to use many of his terms just until their meaning begins to solidify or become ossified. Once they are more than hints or traces, once they offer more than a scent of meaning, they are frequently discarded.
Understanding the relationship between beings and Being as event or clearing both historicises it, and enphasises its endless coming – an endless coming to (in)completion.
Again there are echoes of Romantic theory, with the shifting accentuation provided by the Ereignis, its nature as ‘event’ corresponding to the Romantic truth of ‘becoming,’ the emphasis on process over completion and event over works, which we find epitomised in the theory and practice of the fragment. There is a deliberate attempt, then, to ‘say the absolute,’ to articulate the irreducible as an irreducible through indirect, poetic, yet unavoidably finite, means. The fragmentary, experimental and incomplete nature of esoteric texts like Contributions to Philosophy and Mindfulness 81 might well be read through such structures of deliberate Romantic incompletion and fragmentation. That such texts are frequently considered as ‘Heideggerian thought experiments’ – as
Heidegger writing very close to the act of thought – only stresses a necessary function of fragmentation.
81 Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness , trans. Parvis Emand and Thomas Kalary. London, Continuum, 2006. 105 This position will be reinforced by the discussion in the following chapter, in which
Heidegger’s engagement with the poet Trakl centres on the revelatory nature of an open- ended poetic discourse and the retardation of such revelation when it is constrained within a logico-discursive language. Dialogical texts like the ‘Dialogue on Language’ and the ‘Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking’82 might also be read in these terms.
In many respects, Heidegger’s work epitomises the particular essence of Romantic poetry we read in Athenaeum fragment 116, “that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected.” 83 This thought finds a very particular emphasis when we consider that now, some 30 years after his death, his work continues to ‘arrive’; that, as de Beistegui points out, of the 100 or so volumes planned for his complete works, a little over half have been published. 84
Beyond its sometime open-ended and fragmentary nature, then, Heidegger’s work is an event, is an act of ‘becoming,’ in a very concrete sense.
Transforming Thought
Perhaps there is a thinking outside of the distinction of rational and
irrational, more sober-minded still than scientific technology, more sober-
minded and hence removed, without effect, yet having its own necessity.
‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ 85
If such negativity is to be addressed – whether it is the shifting sands of Ereignis or the
Nothing by which Being is contextualised – a new pathway of thinking is necessary. The
82 Martin Heidegger ‘Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking’ in Discourse on Thinking trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freud. New York, Harper Perennial, 1966. Henceforth cited as CCP. 83 Athenaeum fragment 116. LA, 43. 84 NH, 2. 85 Martin Heidegger ‘The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking’ in Basic Writings, ed David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. 449. Henceforth cited as EoP. 106 opening remarks of this chapter outline Heidegger’s belief that a totalising form of thought, in which calculation and cognition are synonymous, has come to dominate our age. Its effects extend beyond the realms of philosophy to have practical repercussions for how we live: our engagement with technology, our ability to survive in some degree of harmony with the earth, what we might call spirituality, are all related to the question of how we think and how we attribute value to thought.
Heidegger writes in the first lecture of What is Called Thinking that “Science does not think,” 86 highlighting for us the contrast between thought as calculative, what he calls elsewhere “ideational or representational thinking”87 and thought conceived of as a more open, reflective practice oriented towards the question of Being. Although somewhat rhetorical, there is a sense in which this statement is literally true: thinking, for
Heidegger, Denken , is not an act of calculation, and scientific thought is thus not thinking at all. However, not only is science unengaged in such thinking – by Heidegger’s own admission, neither is he. Such thinking would be bound to the event character of presence and revealing: that is, it would find its origin in the world, in history and engagement with ‘the things themselves’ as an active coming to presence, yet it would not be bound to beings, to presence , and would as such be capable of engaging Being.
Thinking, in the Heideggerian sense, concerns Being, while representation/calculation concerns beings. In this regard, for Heidegger the notion of ‘thinking’ is something quite different from that of ‘philosophy,’ or ‘scientific thought,’ and both forms of ‘thought’ are not thinking in the sense that Heidegger wants to denote by the term. Such
Heideggerian thinking stands open to the mysterious and the unsayable, open to the
Nothing, and is as such able to reach beyond the confines of scientism and reason that
86 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking. Trans. J. Glenn Gray. New York, Harper Collins/Perennial, 2004. 8. Henceforth cited as WCT. 87 ibid ., 64. 107 Heidegger sees as binding the thinking of metaphysics. It is for this that Heidegger perceives his own work, beginning with Being and Time , to offer the first steps towards a post-metaphysical thinking, and continues to hold that we have ‘not yet begun to think,’ that we might ‘learn thinking’ only by unlearning what it has traditionally been. 88
Not only is there a distinction between ‘calculative’ ideational/representational thought and the kind of thinking that might open up Being, or Ereignis : Young distinguishes two different forms of genuine post-metaphysical thought in Heidegger – Dichten (poetry) and Denken (thinking). 89 Denken for Heidegger is meditative thinking, a specific form of philosophical thought that is focused, essentially, on the truth of Being. It is such thinking that allows one to experience an openness to the mystery of Being. Dichten on the other hand, poetic thinking, has a more generative element. It is focused on exploring, showing and saying the twofold play of revelation and concealment that is central to Being. Such thinking, Heidegger argues, allows one to step within the mystery of Being.
It is deeply significant that Heidegger identifies and names poetry as a form of thinking , and these two forms remain distinct, yet side by side: the thinking of Being requires both, as meditative thinking can only bring us to the edge of the mystery; it takes poetic thinking to go further, to bring the mystery to light. In both forms of post- metaphysical thinking, the mystery of Being is allowed to remain mysterious. 90
In the language of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ such thinking “ lets the earth be an earth .” 91 The holistic quality of ‘earth’ we find in this essay, its kernel of irreducibility,
88 This theme occurs through many of the later texts, although see particularly WCT and EoP, 431-49. 89 HLP, 18. 90 ibid. 91 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Basic Writings, ed David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. 172. Henceforth cited as OWA. There is much that might be written of the language of this essay. For our purposes here, suffice to say that ‘Earth’ and ‘world’ become key terms within the structure of artistic revelation, demonstrating an ontology that is in some respects bound to nature. ‘World’ 108 echoes Goethe’s axiom that “Nature will reveal nothing under torture.” 92 Heidegger’s
‘earth’ and ‘world’ are not conceptually representable: world “is never an object that stands before us and can be seen,”93 and the earth “shatters every attempt to penetrate it.” 94 Calculative thinking is seen as such an act of penetration, for within the necessary breakdown of things (substances or ideas) into their separate conceptual parts, which characterises scientific (and philosophical) method, this quality of ‘earth’ is lost: we might learn much from such analysis, but only of that which is bound to presence, to beings; nothing of Being. This failure, then, is of the capabilities of “calculating” nature, of the “technical-scientific objectification of nature.” 95
Such objectification misses an essential way of thinking about nature – a holistic approach; nature imbued with mystery, with spirit – and ultimately leads to a form of violent domination.
The question of our relationship with technology and nature, and how our relationship with one determines our engagement with the other, is central in how such domination is understood. It should be emphasised, however, that Heidegger is not opposed to technology per se – technology, or better put, Technics, is the way Being presences in modernity, and we cannot escape from it even should we wish to. However, technology does offer a compendium of challenges: Heidegger offers little by way of diagnosis of the
can be understood as ‘truth’ or the ‘truth of beings’ – essentially, what is revealed; it is the coming to be of truth, its structure of revelation, rather than as the sum total of ‘things’ that the world contains. Earth can be interpreted as what is revealed. The artwork reveals the world as holy , and it is in this that we should understand the meaning of the term ‘earth’ (See Young. HPA. 22). 92 J.W. von Goethe Scientific Studies in Kate Rigby Topographies of the Sacred. Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2004. 19. 93 OWA, 170. 94 ibid., 172. 95 ibid. 109 specific ills of our employment of Technics, such as climate change, or the threat of nuclear conflagration. 96
His analysis, rather, focuses on the essential nature of technology, how it presences and reveals beings; how it reveals our world and the entities living within it purely as
‘resource’: that is, everything is understood through how it might be available for use, as what Heidegger calls Bestand , which is generally translated as ‘standing-reserve.’ 97 The essence of modern technology is thus understood in terms of Gestell ,98 that is, roughly,
‘enframing,’ which is the way in which ‘the actual’ reveals itself as ‘standing-reserve’ under the domination of modern Technics.
The problem is therefore not with the nature of technology as such, but rather that one result of enframing is that it leads to a misunderstanding of Being because it is seen through the lens of metaphysics. Enframing is thus not an aspect of technology per se, and not an act in itself, but rather a mode of disclosure resultant from metaphysical thought. 99
Further, enframing is also a function of language – we represent our world as Bestand through the metaphysical language and tradition. Our way of ‘dwelling’ on the earth has suffered, for we can no longer see the world in terms of ‘earth’; the mythic structures that once gave meaning outside this calculative paradigm have been progressively obliterated
96 It is worth mentioning his infamous comparison between the “motorized food industry” of agriculture and the Nazi “manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps,” made in a lecture in Bremen in 1949. This comment, while appalling, does serve as an interesting illustration of Heidegger’s thought on the level that it is defensible – as an expression of the essential ‘resourcification’ enacted by technology. Such a defense, however, sees the technological ‘essence’ involved as entirely abstracted from the suffering of those exterminated and their families, and this opens a central criticism: that Heidegger, in his quest for ontological essence, fails to recognise the importance of Dasein’s embodied reality. The comment’s failures extend far beyond this of course, and could be the subject of an entirely new discussion. Heidegger’s lecture is cited in Richard Wolin ‘French Heidegger Wars’ in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader. Cambridge, MIT Press, 1993. 291. 97 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. London, Routledge, 1993. 322. Henceforth cited as QCT. 98 ibid.,. 331. 99 See HPA, 44, 76. 110 since the Enlightenment (which in Heideggerian terms must be considered a metaphysical masterstroke).
What is left is a world in which we are ‘homeless,’ in which the gods are absent.
We begin to see here how the difficult and apparently abstract aspects of Heidegger’s thought find concrete emphasis within the world. Metaphysical/calculative thought leads to an understanding of nature whereby it is presented as a resource under the dominion of mankind. Of even greater concern is that human beings themselves are construed solely in terms of resource – are ‘challenged forth’ by technology, are integrated as resource under global enframing, and thus no longer stand over against nature as master or ruler
(although we fantasise that we still do).
A certain truth resonates within this question of ecology, for although there is a rapidly growing ecological movement, the underlying grounds by which the importance of ecology is publicly understood is extremely limited. 100 In this regard, the Heideggerian notion of ‘dwelling’ is a fertile ground, and there is significant literature positioning
Heidegger within an ecological framework. 101 Although there are a range of positions that might be adopted, from a purely pragmatic environmentalism to the deep ecology with which he is frequently associated, what is important when considering Heidegger’s position in these debates is, as Young points out, less that Heidegger’s work can be 100 Although our sense of place in a greater ecosystem is now strengthening, for example, this issue is essentially gaining momentum due not to an increased sense of importance of ‘nature’ in its own terms, but rather from self-interest – that if we destroy the planet, we run the risk of destroying ourselves. The idea of the earth represented purely as a resource becomes central in Heidegger’s thinking, and we can see here how the opposition to it finds part of its origin and explanation within these more holistic ideas of value such as ‘earth,’ and of a ‘necessary mystery’ dwelling within any conceptualisation of our environment. Such ‘necessary mystery’ is therefore not a will to ignorance, but is a search for a new kind of truth, a new framework of understanding. 101 See, for instance, Michael E. Zimmerman, ‘Rethinking the Heidegger Deep Ecology Relationship’ in Environmental Ethics, Volume 15, No. 3, (Fall, 1993). 195 – 224. For a text that uses Heidegger for ‘environmental ends,’ see Jonathan Bate The Song of the Earth. Picador, London, 2000. An interesting path through Buddhist/Heideggerian negativity and into the deep ecology of Arne Naess ( Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Shambhala, Boston, 1990) can be found in Zimmerman’s essay ‘Heidegger, Buddhism, and Deep Ecology’ in The Cambridge Companion to Martin Heidegger. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 240-69. 111 employed for environmental ends, but rather that such environmentalism is grounded in his philosophy of Being. That is, we must care for our environment not for selfish, sentimental or aesthetic reasons, but because such caring is part of who we are: to be distant from nature, considering nature’s place in the fourfold of earth, sky, divinities and mortals, is to be distant from Being. Heidegger’s importance, therefore, is not that he was an ecological thinker, but rather that he is one who founds such thinking. 102
An alternative mode of thinking, however, in which we do not represent things in terms of Gestell , is not merely a question of choosing to think in another way. Our way of thought is historically embedded (in Being), is deeply engrained in who we are (as
Dasein). Heidegger writes in the ‘Letter on Humanism’ that the overcoming of metaphysics might be achieved not by a striving to go higher than thinking has gone, or by re-scaling the heights of thought, but by “climbing back down to the nearness of the nearest.” 103 Heidegger’s choice of language is telling here, for there is an irreducible dwelling within such metaphors: our way of situating ourselves within such language is more embodied and imagistic than conceptual, which itself highlights a linguistic limit within the representational discourse of beings.
The difficulty of extending such metaphors of proximity into a functional model of thought is part of the point; one guide we have is how the product of thinking is imagined. Thinking for Heidegger is Being itself coming to presence as language: 104 thinking might unearth the truth of Being, become, as it were, the “recollection of Being.”
102 HLP, 121. To look at exactly what such a foundation means, look at Michel Haar, The Song of the Earth: Heidegger and the Grounds of the History of Being, trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1993. 103 LH, 254. 104 ibid., 217. 112 Yet Heidegger tells us that “such a thinking has no result. It has no effect. It satisfies its essence in that it is,” 105 and further, such thinking’s “material relevance is essentially higher than the validity of the sciences, because it is freer.” 106 Science and mathematics are embedded within the discourse of calculation, of metaphysics. That this ‘new thinking’ has ‘no result’ further intensifies the opposition between meditative/reflective and calculative/instrumental modes of thought. The essentially unrepresentable character of Being is foregrounded.
Yet what are we to understand by this? Are we to imagine such thinking in terms of the
‘proximity’ sketched in the metaphor above, as a drawing into nearness – itself perhaps understood through phenomenology, through Heidegger’s origins in Husserl? Again, we enter into an expressive negativity at the core of Heidegger’s reawakening of the question of Being.
Part of our way of responding to this absence of ‘result/effect,’ of a thinking that maintains not only a core element of negativity within its result, but rather has a result that is defined by its own absence, is to remember that Heidegger conceives of the process of questioning itself as a kind of ‘listening to Being.’ Part of the greatness of
Socrates, as we read earlier, was that he placed himself within the draft of thought. 107
Given that we are told in the opening pages of Being and Time that Being is indefinable within traditional metaphysics, that it is a question, at present, without an answer, 108 any opposition to calculative/representational thought might, in a certain sense, seem logically ‘without result.’ How might one think the Nothing, for instance, except by a thought that somehow encompasses a certain nothingness, an absence .
105 ibid ., 259. 106 ibid. 107 WCT, 17. 108 BT, 23-4. 113 In ‘What are Poets for?’ Heidegger quotes Rilke’s description of the poet’s role, and
Rilke’s image, rendered in French, offers us an interesting picture of Heidegger’s attempted encircling of Ereignis and Being: “Nous bitions éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible.” 109 Albert Hofstadter’s English retranslation reads: “We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the Invisible.” What this translation fails to capture is perhaps the most telling aspect of the phrase: in the French, “éperdument” is also ‘frantically’ or
‘passionately,’ which brings home to us the poetic project, and Heidegger’s place within it, a little more clearly, capturing something of the flight of the bee, half-mad with the scent of pollen, compelled to restless circling by a presence beyond its knowing, yet central, undeniable; Heidegger, passionately – frantically – ceaselessly, writing paper after paper, book after book, his endless meditations and poetic explosions as he tries to articulate that invisibility; making a life of that which is forever beyond his grasp. It is partly Heidegger’s belief in the poet’s ability address the ‘golden beehive of the invisible’ that motivates his emphasis on poetry, on the links that he propagates between the two disciplines.
Despite the difficulties of representation, we begin to understand the essential nature of this negativity, and thus come to understand Heidegger’s claim that to be occupied with the Nothing is not nihilistic, but oddly enough the opposite, as the metaphysical tradition, in ignoring the presence of the Nothing, is responsible for the subsequent forgetting of
Being. The Nothing, we are told, is “ more-being than any beings” 110 and it is thus, for
Heidegger, only by asking the question of the Nothing that we might reach beyond beings and lift ourselves from the pit of nihilism. Within such a framework, we see clearly how poetic/meditative thinking – thinking the Nothing – opens a counter-current to that of 109 WPF, 128. 110 CTP, 188. 114 metaphysics: if the question of Being is the most fundamental of questions, and if it has been neglected since the ancient Greeks because it cannot be thought in terms of presence, then a reframing of the centrality of presence within thinking is necessary.
When Heidegger states in ‘What Is Metaphysics’ that just saying “the nothing is...” is itself contradictory, we might then read this not as an impediment, a road block at which our progress necessarily halts, but rather as the trail itself – a spark that lights our way towards some kind of originary, post-metaphysical thought .
While we are lost in the discourse of metaphysics, there can be no movement towards
Being, as metaphysical thought is the history of, and the act of, moving away from the
Nothing’s abyss, closing ourselves off from the possibilities of this fecund negativity.
It is poetry which might engage this abyss. From the perspective of understanding poetry, and the artwork generally, as a communication which might engage a fundamentally indeterminate ground, it is important to see that some form of expression takes place through an indirect communication despite its irreducibility to a formal system. The following chapters will spend considerable time exploring what this means for our understanding of Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work, and how such a communication should be considered and approached.
It is worth adding that there is, at least superficially, an intuitive logic to Heidegger’s approach: when we place ourselves within the world, within, for example, the ‘everyday’ urban landscape at the end of the previous chapter, with its late afternoon light and quiet movement of trees, and we think about the nature of representation which might bring the communicative element of such an experience to light, what we arrive at is not a logico- scientific discourse, or a calculative assessment of the empirical qualities of the moment
– wind speeds, humidity, temperature, cultural artefacts and architectural history – but
115 rather a communication which aims itself at the transcendent je ne sais qua of the experience; this place, this time, this earth .
We might arrive, that is, at a poem, or an artwork, not because they offer alternative points of access to such an experience, but rather because they seem to offer the only way in which such experience might be articulated.
In Contributions to Philosophy , Heidegger states that when the ‘lighting-concealing’ of truth is experienced as Ereignis , it happens as ‘transport and enchantment,’ precisely the same words he uses to describe the poet’s experience of presence. Young’s conclusion is that in joining this ecstatic experience of Being, in which the world shows up as holy, is the Ereignis experience itself; that is, Ereignis is Ereignis of the holy. 111
For Heidegger, the experience of the poet reflects such ‘holiness,’ and the poet’s way of being in the world inhabits such a state. The poet’s envelopment within the world, then, is this form of thinking: the poet is there, within the ‘fourfold’ of gods, sky, earth and mortals, and is open to the experiencing of them. This emphasis on a kind of sacredness of experience, on an irreducibility that defies calculation, urgently radiates from Heidegger’s later work. One portion of the abyss over which the poet dangles words is this irreducibility, meaning disappearing into darkness. But it is the abyss of the
Nothing, of Being, of brightness and void, which is the meaning of meaning’s disappearance.
The act of poetry is the world’s holiness come to language; it is itself a leap, beyond meaning. It is both the particular poetic functions of language, and its ontological functions, which are seen to elevate the poem’s potential to express this abyss. These relationships are not always explored explicitly in Heidegger’s work, but by unravelling their various threads we will come to better understand what it is that Heidegger is
111 HPA, 106-7. 116 reaching for, and how it ties in with the discourses of negativity that are so central to this discussion.
117 118 4
Heidegger and Poetic Revelation: Artwork, Thought and Word
Everything depends upon this alone, that the truth of Being come
to language and that thinking attain to this language. Perhaps,
then, language requires much less precipitate expression than
proper silence.
‘Letter on Humanism’ 1
For Heidegger, all problems come down to the question of Being. But how might the truth of Being, with its innate negativity, its inexpressibility, come into language? The essential nature of our world is imbued with Geheimnis , that is, a ‘secret’ or ‘mystery,’ and the nature of Being is a simultaneous revelation and concealment, with the mystery naming such concealment. Being defies re-presentation, but a language that envelops the mystery as mystery is, for Heidegger, capable of illuminating it for what it is, as that which is palpable yet beyond re-presentation. We see, then, why the framework of negative disclosure is so very vital for Heidegger: if everything depends upon the truth of
Being coming into language, and such a movement necessarily involves the perpetuation of ‘mystery,’ of a necessary irreducibility, the nature and methodology of such disclosure is vital. Dichten, poetry, fulfils this role because the active relationships of the poem, between language, meaning and Being, are for Heidegger themselves a playing-out of
Being. Poetry sidesteps the impasse of re-presentation by accessing more primordial
1 LH, 246. 119 processes of world-revelation than ‘the language of metaphysics.’ Although Being is not reducible to a language of poetry, it is still articulated in some manner, and we are reminded here the Romantic paradox of the “impossibility and the necessity of complete communication.” 2
Here, everything depends upon achieving the impossible, upon a language that might articulate silence.
From Poetic Thought to Poetic Word
If, as Heidegger says, “the whole sphere of presence is present in
saying” and “only where there is language is there world” then it is
not a tautology to maintain the obvious, namely, that what manifests
itself in the poem is first and foremost language. And what manifests
itself in and through language? . . . “language contains no word so
slight that the hour of its birth was not one of powerful and awesome
self-revealment . . . How much of profound philosophy, of divine
revelation was there in that small word ‘I’ that man first uttered!”
Alvin Rosenfeld 3
The difference that most immediately strikes the reader going from the earlier to the later Heidegger is the dramatic transformation in expression, and one thing that is frequently lost in the secondary literature, as it attempts to rigorously articulate the difficulties of Heideggerian thought, is what an exciting experience it can be to read him. 4
Whether or not one supports or even follows his frequent twists, puns and shifts in
2 Critical Fragment 108 in Critchley, 2001. 114. 3 Alvin H. Rosenfeld ‘“The Being of Language and the Language of Being” Heidegger and Modern Poetics’ in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature. Bloomington, Indiana University, 1976. 200. The final citation within this citation is from Chaim Bialik. 4 An exception is de Beistegui, who describes the encounter with Heidegger in terms of “vertigo.” NH, 1. 120 intonation and intensity, purely as a linguistic surface 5 his language is radiant. This is true from his early work until his last texts. Not long after the publication of Being and Time, this surface begins to shift from a conceptually dense language, filled with neologisms, into a more ‘literary’ mode: poetry is post-metaphysical thinking for Heidegger (at least one form of it), and as a consequence his work, literally, becomes more poetic.
There is also experimentation with different structures of expression, from dialogue to essay, many of which demonstrate a fragmentary openness which parallels the conceptual openness found in the Romantics. This marks a shift in the way his thinking itself is structured: Heidegger entered the philosophical world with a tome, Being and Time, which although incomplete runs to around five hundred pages. There is no such text in his later period, as he predominantly chooses to address his inquiry in the form of shorter essays, some of which are dialogues, others traditionally essayistic, others still offering a
‘spiritualised’ ontological language, spanning the ‘gap’ (such as it is) between nature, culture and the ‘spiritual.’
The vibrancy of Heidegger’s language, its sparks and radical departures, all reflect a poetic engagement that is intended to think Being, to depart from the logico-discursive language of metaphysics that had previously blocked thought’s progress.
Heidegger was thus not opposed to logic per se, but sought an alternative mode of disclosure: what lay beyond and beneath logic needed to be uncovered, a more primordial mode of expression. His much famed ‘attack on logic’ in ‘What is Metaphysics’ is therefore, as he writes in the ‘Letter on Humanism,’ not “to break a lance for the
5 Writing of a linguistic ‘surface’ is not intended to diminish the penetration of language – ontological, corporeal, cultural – but just to demonstrate that there is a performative aspect to this writing, a music which, although not extricable from its conceptual aspect, is separable in some respects. 121 illogical” 6 but to seek the greatest proximity to logic’s origin in logos : or as he states it, metaphorically, to step back down the mountain and see the mountain for what it is, and feel the earth for what it is. 7 If Being is conceived of as a mystery contextualised by nothingness, Heidegger regards it as a necessary endeavour to employ a language that might express the negativity of this relationship in all its uncertainty and flux: that is, poetry .
The formalisation of language, the necessity of conforming to established structures of logic, is seen to make the engagement with such flux impossible, as it denies language’s existence as transformative event. Language is a living happening for Heidegger – it is energeia , as he writes, following Wilhelm von Humboldt. 8 Enargeia ,9 he writes elsewhere, “which has the same root as argentum (silver), means that which in itself and of itself radiates and brings itself to light.” 10 Language is thus seen as disclosive – as
‘bringing itself and the world to light.’ If Being is itself found in the unfolding event by which existence ‘appropriates’ man, only a language capable of touching that event is capable of speaking Being. Such language must exist within the event itself, must be the event.
In its primary or originary mode, language for Heidegger is seen not to refer to the world, but to disclose it: a “whole sphere of presence present in saying.” The distinction
6 LH, 251. 7 ibid., 254. 8 ‘The Way to Language’ in On The Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. 117. Henceforth cited as WTL. 9 Although these terms have different meanings and etymology, the emphasis Heidegger is drawing from them points in a similar direction. Further, as Eva Keuls notes: “The two terms energeia and enargeia are not related etymologically. The former comes from the root erg , “work,” and has given us the derivative “energy.” The latter is derived from the adjective argos , “clear,” and means brightness, lucidity and, by extension, visual vividness. In the Greco-Roman rhetorical literature, however, a contamination of the two terms took place. In the Greek texts they are used interchangeably, and in the Latin translations of enargeia the notions of “lucidity,” “visual vividness,” and “forcefulness” are intermingled.” Eva Keuls ‘Rhetoric and Visual Aids in Greece and Rome.’ In Communication Arts in the Ancient World , ed. Eric A. Havelock and Jackson Hershbell. New York, Hastings House, 1978. 124. 10 EoP, 443. 122 drawn here is between a language which reveals the world, and language which simply points to that which is previously given. 11
To “poeticise” something thus means to “tell something that, prior to this, has not yet been told.” 12 As Rosenfeld’s comments testify, the word carries with it the weight of its birth within the world, and although language may be ‘corrupted,’ although it may lose much of its disclosive power, it is still language which is the voice and mouthpiece, “the house of the truth of Being.” 13 The clearing of Being must be understood as an event of language , so not only is language “the foundation of the human being,” 14 but it is of and through language that Being is disclosed.
The way in which language is used is thus vital. The ‘mere calculative use of language’ cannot reveal Being, but rather only permits language to be used to ‘dominate beings.’ Heidegger wants to oppose this instrumental interpretation and employment of language, which sees it as merely a code that transfers information, with the view that sees language as ontologically disclosive: “scientific and philosophical information about language is one thing; an experience we undergo with language is another.” 15
It is the poet who undergoes an experience of language and makes this experience manifest to others, for the poet “obtains entrance into the relation of word to thing.” 16
The twilit norn watches over her bourn, the well in those depths she searches for the
names she would bring forth from it. Word, language, belongs within the domain of this
mysterious language in which poetic saying borders on the fateful source of speech .17
11 See especially WTL, 111-36. 12 Martin Heidegger Holderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1996. 8. Henceforth cited as I. 13 LH, 223. 14 WTL, 112. 15 ‘The Nature of Language’ in On The Way to Language , trans. Peter D. Hertz. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. 59. Henceforth cited as NL. 16 NL, 66. 123
This declaration, from ‘The Nature of Language,’ epitomises this shift into a more literary mode: Heidegger is employing mythic structures, narrative and indeterminacy in his figure of the “twilit norn, ancient goddess of fate,” 18 the form and content of his writing a powerful enaction of the poetic mode. Poetic saying, here, is seen to touch on the origins of language, the point at which meaning is born.
“What is spoken purely is the poem,” 19 Heidegger writes, because the poem is not about transmitting information, but about giving us an experience of language which is effectively untranslatable. Such untranslatability is at the core of this revelatory model of expression. In giving birth to its own meaning, in bringing meaning into being and disclosing the world, the poem offers a meaning that otherwise would not exist. Yet being so, in being untranslatable , the poem cannot find another mode of disclosure; it cannot be translated into logic or metaphysical discourse any more than a painting, or a sculpture, or a dance; it cannot be reduced to its content as information .20
The poem, that is, retains an essential mystery – the ‘mystery’ of language’s birth – and in retaining such mystery, such essential undisclosability, is seen to engage the innate negativity of Being.
In contrast, the ‘calculative’ use of language in ‘representational’ thinking, in attempting to conceptually ground beings, will not allow the perpetuation of mystery, for within such thinking the ‘mystery’ can only be conceived of in terms of ‘non-being’: it is thus fundamentally incapable of addressing Being in the terms which Heidegger gives it.
Carnap’s objections to ‘What is Metaphysics’ represent its language as “metaphysical
17 ibid., 66-7. My emphasis. 18 ibid., 67. 19 Martin Heidegger, ‘Language’ in Poetry, Language, Thought , trans. Albert Hofstandter. New York, Perennial Classics, 2001. 192. 20 NH, 150. 124 pseudo-statements . . . contradictory, hence absurd, even if it were not already meaningless.” 21 The vehemence, the correctness (in his own terms) of Carnap’s barrage, illustrates the difficulty of Heidegger’s project: ‘the nothing is,’ by the rules of semantics, within the logic of a metaphysical discourse, is meaningless.
And yet, for Heidegger, with Being the central inquiry, some way to explore the interplay of revelation and concealment, of presence and absence, is necessary. Being, in some sense, is the Nothing – that is, it is ‘no thing,’ is not an entity.
“The nothing is,” is thus itself a poetic disclosure, revealing to us, opening us to, a void that we all know, whether we admit and seek to articulate it or not.
In Section 34 of Being and Time , Heidegger writes that “the phenomenon of communication must be understood in an ontologically broad sense.” 22 In the later essay
‘A Dialogue on Language,’ 23 based around a conversation with the Japanese Germanist
Tezuka Tomio, the idea of communication, both as language – speech and non-speech – and silence, gains this expanded ontological significance. This essay, a dramatically presented dialogue between ‘A Japanese’ and ‘An Inquirer,’ steps from language as speech into communication as an ontological cornerstone, through the gate of Eastern philosophy, and represents one response to the paradox of a language of silence. 24
That the essay is presented as a dialogue is significant, as is its verbal theatre: the
‘event’ nature of the dialogue was seen by Heidegger as offering the kind of linguistic
21 Rudolf Carnap in Thomas Fay, Heidegger: The Critique of Logic . The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, 1977. 41. 22 BT, 151. 23 Heidegger, Martin, ‘A Dialogue on Language’ in On The Way to Language. San Francisco, Harper Collins, 1971. Henceforth cited as DL. 24 In the context of Taoist and Zen practice the pursuit of nothingness seems less significant a departure from preceding ways of thought, although its challenge to the western tradition is not in question. Heidegger’s ‘Dialogue’ is one of his only significant acknowledgements of the debt he owes to East Asian thinking. See Reinhard May Heidegger's hidden sources : East-Asian influences on his work, trans. Graham Parkes. New York, Routledge, 1996; Graham Parkes (Ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought , Honolulu, University of Hawaii, 1990. 125 opening that may be closed off in other forms of discourse, and the dramatic form alone contrasts the work significantly with the bulk of Heidegger’s other writings. The
‘Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking,’ which also follows the dialogical form, is a rare exception.
The subject of the ‘Dialogue on Language’ is ostensibly the origin and significance of language, although the work might be read in a variety of ways; amongst them, as an exposition of the difference between Eastern and Western ways of Being and artistic practice, and as a reflection on Gestell , particularly as a question of language. The
‘Japanese’ and ‘Inquirer,’ cross and re-cross each others’ existential planes, mapping, with at times obscure and enigmatic verbal gestures, the extent of difference between
Western and Eastern Being within language, and sketching as they do so the danger posed by Gestell and language’s instrumentalisation.
The theatre in the movement of ideas is significant: the ‘Inquirer’s’ reticence for the
‘Japanese’ to adopt Western modes of analysis, the ebb and flow of their conversation, which progresses into a kind of dance, all culminating in the final passages, which are as mysterious, rich and poetic as we might find anywhere in Heidegger’s oeuvre.
That philosophy must escape the language of metaphysics in order to approach the truth of things themselves is explored thematically and within the form and substance of the text itself. The poeticism and circularity of the dialogue indicates the shift in how language is conceived and problematised, with Heidegger consistently circling back over familiar ground with a subtle shift in inflection occurring with each iteration. Above all, this dialogue attempts to keep the idea of language in play – dynamic rather than static.
I: Speaking about language turns language almost inevitably into an object.
126 J: And then its reality vanishes. 25
...what is required is a dialogue, in which language is allowed to ‘speak for itself’:
J: The course of such a dialogue would have to have a character all its own, with more
silence than talk.
I: Above all, silence about silence... 26
That the explicit presentation of language ‘makes its reality vanish’ echoes our understanding of the mystery of Being and the problematics of its representation within the kinds of language systems from which Heidegger is attempting to move away. As he writes in the opening citation from the ‘Letter on Humanism,’ perhaps “language requires much less precipitate expression than proper silence.” 27 A silence about silence takes expressive negativity to its ultimate end, locating the expression of language’s essence within this fecund double negative. The idea is of similar form to the statement that “the nothing nothings,” from ‘What is Metaphysics,’ in which one generative negative seeds another. This kind of logical impossibility is not simply a rhetorical device for Heidegger: rather, it illustrates the way in which his philosophical worldview is defined by the possibility of generative absences, and how they need to be seen as expressive if Being is to be addressed.
There is documentation of Heidegger’s meeting with a Buddhist monk from Bangkok, who is reported to have said: “nothingness is not “nothing,” but rather the completely other: fullness. No one can name it. But it – nothing and everything – is fulfilment,” to which Heidegger responded with: “That is what I’ve been saying, my whole life long.” 28
25 DL, 50. 26 ibid., 52. 27 LOH. 246. 28 May, 1996. 3. 127
That Heidegger would write of a silence about silence marks the primordial that he is searching-out in language as definitively pre-linguistic. In this dialogue, Heidegger elevates this expressive silence as a discourse that is in some ways more complete, more capable of expressing the mystery, than language itself. Such a silence carries the primordial echoes of all language, all Being, all nothingness. It remains open to the event, to flux, just as the fragment remains in a state of perpetual potential meaning through its opening to the constant arrival of meaning within other fragments, other ideas.
In the same way we read the ‘Dialogue on Language’ as retaining some of the cadence and pausing, some of the ebb and flow, of a literal dialogue, and as such see it as extending meaning ‘beyond’ the explicit meaning of the text: the dialogue must, and does, as the inquirer comments, “remain constantly coming.” 29 In its way the dialogue is a persistent form of questioning: not unlike the fragment, it is always incomplete, always moving beyond itself, always opening upon the next moment of speech; it avoids conclusiveness; it carries its own possibility of silence.
Silence here is the primordial inception of speech: it is the emergence of the word within the world. The connection that is drawn between silence and the expression of
Being in the opening citation from the ‘Letter on Humanism’ might also be seen as a silence about silence, for such a fecund silence necessarily speaks the language of naissance , of arrival and birth; such a silence is on the verge of expression, and its cusp- of-arrival; its stillness before the birth-cry is the one language in which Being might be fully heard. As we see within the nature of this dialogue, a language of silence is characterised by indirection, by the disclosure of absence rather than presence. Within an indirect linguistic disclosure, silence can still be heard. Such a silence is characterised by
29 DL, 52. 128 the poem, for poetic saying is the saying of what is not present within the poem. It is what the poem speaks, not with its words but what is between them.
Silence is a poetic language of pre-meaning, of emergence.
Just as poetic thinking names a process that is not constrained by the strictures
Heidegger identifies in the ‘language of metaphysics,’ so too poetic practice comes to be seen as capable of addressing this kind of negativity, this indirect disclosure, by an opening upon meaning’s formation. No poet is more important for Heidegger than the
Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin, although the way which Hölderlin functions for
Heidegger is not immediately articulable within this kind of ‘discourse of negativity.’
Hölderlin assumes a number of roles, and as the epitome of a ‘poet for a destitute time’ his most prominent role is that of a kind of poetico-spiritual guide, who might be seen to help man enter into a relationship with Being through a more profound relationship with the world as it is.
Heidegger identifies two important strains of thought in Hölderlin, one to do with the nature of poetry and why it is important, and the other to do with humankind’s relationship to society and the world; Heidegger’s question of spiritual destitution comes directly from Hölderlin, and modernity’s ‘spiritual decline’ is one of the principal messages Heidegger discovers in the poet’s work. 30
This thought underscores all of Heidegger’s later writing, and for Heidegger it is the poets who are able to see this decline for what it is and ‘sing’ it, to demonstrate it in poetic creation. In Heidegger’s thinking, the world is defined in Hölderlin’s work by the absence created by such spiritual decline, 31 and we might therefore say that the principal
30 HPA, 75. 31 ibid. 129 mood Heidegger identifies in Hölderlin’s work is this particular form of spiritual/ontological negativity.
As his thinking on poetry develops, Heidegger increasingly comes to extend his poetic analysis beyond the spiritual decline and more abstract musings of the poet’s importance, and more specifically into poetry’s expressive negativity. On several occasions this negativity is explained in terms of an ‘expressive silence.’
He writes in ‘Language in the Poem,’ for example, of discovering the “unspoken statement” in Georg Trakl’s “spoken poems,” 32 and writes that a poem of Rainer Maria
Rilke’s “tells us something indirectly” 33 of the ground of Being in ‘What are Poets For?.’
A similar kind of negativity is in play in What is Called Thinking where Heidegger writes of the “unthought in a thinker’s thought,” writing that such an “unthought” is the
“greatest gift that thinking can bestow.” 34 While there is a difference between the
‘unspoken’ and the ‘unthought,’ both are demonstrated through unstated elements of a text – textual absences, silences – as offering important, perhaps the most important, expressive contributions of particular works.
Silences about silence speaking of the Being of beings. Such unspoken and unthought elements ‘remain constantly coming’ – they are meaning in the act of finding form.
We must therefore keep this context of expressive negativity as an ‘unthought’ in mind when reading Heidegger’s later work—not only are we seen, on some level, to understand something from such generative lacunae, but it appears for Heidegger that they are the very centre of his project: if we are to take him at his word, are perhaps its
‘greatest gift.’ Poetry is then seen to demonstrate the kind of expression which might 32 ‘Language in the Poem’ in On The Way to Language , Trans. Peter D. Hertz. Harper Collins, San Francisco, 1971. 161. Henceforth cited as LP. 33 WPF, 100. 34 WCT, 76. 130 approach Being, not only because of these links between the expressive negativity we locate within the poem and the ontic and ontological negativity of existence and Being, but because the poem seeks to represent the world in a certain way: that is, it’s not only that poetry is capable of representing the world as mysterious, but that such a representation is the very heart of the poetic act.
Poetry – and again, it is modern poetry in particular that bears this quality – seeks to function through certain unsaid elements: the ‘unspoken’ and ‘indirectness’ of Trakl and
Rilke arrives in symbolic expression (which occurs on many levels – from spiritual and mythic structures to the physical properties of objects and into the words themselves), poetic ‘song structure’ (the poem’s sound shape) and rhythm, the individual word-sounds themselves and the interrelation of those sounds both with each other and with structures of meaning. It is the ‘unspokenness’ and ‘indirection’ dwelling within such forms, that we understand as the ‘silent language’ of the poem.
In Trakl’s poem ‘Springtime of the Soul,’ which Heidegger analyses in ‘Language in the Poem,’ a series of relationships emerge between the metaphysical assumptions one makes of the concept of the soul, and the physical properties of the earth. Expressive negatives such as ‘death’ and ‘silence’ are woven into sensory locators such as ‘twilight dusk,’ anchoring them, albeit within a flux that is stable only imagistically.
In the poem ‘Summer’s End,’ a relationship is opened between sound, as ‘quiet,’ and the movement of time. In another series of poems, an equation is made between
‘blueness’ and the holy. 35 The poem operates via an expanded set of connotative linguistic relationships, employing and emphasising the links between different elements of the physical and the ideational/linguistic universes. A connection such as that established between the blue and the holy might be seen to employ a typical movement –
35 LP, 164-6. 131 the sky and heaven have a longstanding association, and in the French language, for instance, one word, ciel , names them both.
Yet for Heidegger, what is established goes deeper than that: the blueness does not indicate a sense of the holy, as such, but rather “Blueness itself is the holy , in virtue of its gathering depth which shines forth only as it veils itself.” 36 While Heidegger’s poeticism may be read as a reference to the nature of our visual interaction with sky, what he is reaching towards here is more than a reference to sensory engagement, but a locating of holiness within abstract physical properties of the world – the sky’s blueness is, after all, is a refraction, a reaction of space and depth: it is the impression of solidity within an absence. The blue of the ocean might be read through a similar trajectory: a mystery, a beyond, yet an everyday aspect of our world.
The strengthening of connections between the everyday and these transcendent moments might be seen to locate us within the holy in our everyday lives. The negativity of the poem, the way it expands levels of connective possibility between linguistic, sensory, ontological, spiritual and mythical structures, permits the articulation of phenomena otherwise conceived of as intangible. In this way, the poem positions ‘the people’ within the holy: poetry, for Heidegger, is a poetic of the holy, and the poem brings such holiness into our lives .
The poem discloses the world as a holy place.
It should however be noted that the explication of this relationship – between the ontological and the poem’s ‘unsaid’ – is not developed in the early work, and that in fact it is only later in his career that Heidegger explicitly confronts the power of expression resting in poetry’s negativity. The early Hölderlin texts and ‘The Origin of the Work of
36 ibid., 166. My emphasis. 132 Art’ all neglect to specify the nature of poetry’s particular value as poetry , reading rather a quasi-spiritualist agenda into the work, charging the poet with the role physician to a destitute age via a kind of ‘holiness’ of message. 37 Véronique Fóti argues that early in
Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin, the attempt to reveal the philosophical elements of the poet’s thinking effects its transformation into prose, and, more specifically, into the prose of Heidegger’s thought. 38 For Heidegger, Hölderlin is something of a prophet of the
German people, a poet not only of the present, but of the future, whose task is the naming of the holy. 39
To an extent this reification seems justifiable, even necessary, however the result is that Hölderlin is at times reduced to a philosopher-poet, a thinker who happens to write in verse, and the necessity of the poetic is lost. The importance of poetry is reduced to that of ‘poetic thinking,’ and the poem as an object, as a linguistic exercise, disappears.
Where these relationships are not well established, the kind of connections that are explored above are less apparent: one might then ask, to what degree poetry is necessary, if all that it contains might have been more clearly produced by writing it in prose in the first place. If the poet’s task is only that of thinker, no matter what kind of thinker he is, what happens to this vital kernel of truth that only the poet may reveal? What is the value and essence of the poetic in poetic thought?
Hölderlin is not the only poet to whom Heidegger offers these highly specific, arguably deceptive, readings. Trakl, Rilke and Mörike, amongst others, were also placed under this numinous searchlight. In his focused pursuit of the revelation of holiness, at times
Heidegger drains the power of poetic form and structure, and the linguistic physicality of the words themselves, so that the articulation of the poetics of writers like Trakl and 37 HPA. 102-3. 38 Véronique Fóti, Heidegger and the Poets. London, Humanities, 1992. 111. 39 Werner Brock, ‘An Account of the Four Essays’ in Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being. Chicago, Gateway, 1968. 169. 133 Rilke is constantly being subsumed by an onto-theological meta-poetic. Fóti sees this as a constant movement towards essentialisation and unification, 40 producing a homogenised oneness that often overlooks the inherent poetic of the work itself. The nature and specificity of Heidegger’s search, this quest for art that speaks Being and guides man along his historically destined path, means that such labels as “a poet for destitute times” run the risk of coming to signal very selective interpretations of the poet’s function, in which the strengths and weaknesses of the work as poetry are secondary to their place within Heidegger’s overarching narrative of ontological decline and salvation.
It is within Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin that these criticisms ring particularly true, for Hölderlin’s role as poet is frequently aligned with the greater movement of
Heidegger’s thought; Hölderlin epitomises an ideal poet who is, in effect, a kind of prophet, whose role is the naming of the holy and calling of the gods. Within this theological role the poet is also he who consolidates the German nation, who erects an image of nation within this greater account of holiness.
Heidegger’s description of Hölderlin’s last elegy, ‘Homecoming,’ for instance, is filled with the language of theology, ‘ Volk ’ and ‘nation.’ The poem, we are told, meditates upon what “the poet in his poet-hood evokes (“The Holy”),” 41 so that the role of the poet is akin to that of theologian. In ‘Remembrance of the Poet,’ in which Heidegger meditates upon this poem, a series of relationships emerge between a highly nationalised conception of place and the greater theme of holiness, locating the holy within “the house”; that is, within a particular house, amidst the German forest, out in the countryside, and nestled within the changing seasons.
40 Fóti, 1992. 111. 41 Martin Heidegger, ‘Remembrance of the Poet’ in Existence and Being . Chicago, Gateway, 1968. 233. Henceforth cited as RP. 134 Such holiness is aligned with the transformative event of the seasons, with “the
Serene” that arrives at the heights of the Alps and their meeting with the heavens. “[T]he highest,” “the Serene,” “preserves and holds everything in tranquillity and wholeness.”
“[F]or the poet,” Heidegger tells us, “the highest and the Holy are one and the same: the
Serene.” 42 This spiritualised conception of place is a coming together of nature and
German culture within Heidegger’s expansive ontology. Heidegger’s methodology here
(and elsewhere) is to single-out certain words in order to convey particular spiritual concerns, so that words like ‘Serene’ and ‘joy’ are attributed greater significance within larger spiritual structures, while the poetic context of the words, as a linguistic question, is largely ignored, except inasmuch as the poetic for Heidegger is this singing of the holy.
To be fair to Heidegger, in the case of Hölderlin this expanded ontico-spiritual significance is very close to the surface of the original text, and although Heidegger’s reading does focus on particular elements, Hölderlin really is concerned with an exploration of the relationship between holiness and place, and does locate such holiness within majestic landscapes. As he writes in ‘Homecoming’ – “a place in the mountains amicably captivates me.” 43
It is hard to argue, therefore, that Heidegger is always doing violence to the text in his readings, or just missing their point. The issue, rather, is that the status of the work as a poem disappears within Heidegger’s analysis, that as an art-form the material of that art is conspicuously absent – like a discussion of Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ 44 that focuses on the rise of Franco or the Nazi involvement in the Spanish Civil War, without discussing the works imagery and symbolism, its striking style and muted tones. For Heidegger, the poet of ‘Homecoming’ is a mouthpiece of nature and spirit, he is the wanderer who cannot
42 ibid, 251. 43 Friedrich Hölderlin ‘Homecoming’ in RP, 240. 44 Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica,’ 1937. Oil on canvas, Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid. 135 help but speak, for “It is joy.” 45 Homecoming, in the end, “is the future of the historical being of the German people,” 46 and Heidegger’s remembrance is the remembrance of a thinking that occurs in proximity to this spiritualised poetic space. There is a sense, therefore, that for Heidegger the principal capacity of the work has more to do with
‘spirit’ than poetic practice, and to focus on the poem as an object is to miss the poem’s underlying function.
In The Ister Heidegger frames his discussion of Hölderlin’s posthumously published hymn ‘The Ister’ in similar terms, exploring the ontological and spiritual significance of the Donau River. However, although there are correspondences between these discussions, Heidegger’s analysis in The Ister is far more extensive. Further, Heidegger’s textual analysis does engage the question of language in its own terms, albeit briefly, with an exploration of the poem’s linguistic relationships, its emphases and intonations. The poem’s opening line, for instance
Jezt komme, Feuer!
Now come, fire! 47
is emphasised for the tone it gives the poem as a whole, and the “sensuous” quality of the poem is examined in terms of its “spiritual” content. 48 In itself this speaks volumes about the prevailing current of Heidegger’s thought, for the sensual qualities of the artwork are consistently subsumed within these kinds of spiritualised or ontologised meta-narratives.
There is a suggestion that for Heidegger the materiality of language, which is so vital to poetic function, is only of importance inasmuch as it indicates originary ontological or 45 RP, 260. 46 ibid., 268. 47 I, 14. 48 ibid., 16. 136 spiritual reflections; that a discussion of the poem’s materiality is only to address a surface mannerism to what is in fact a far deeper concern.
This contrasts with the reality of Heidegger’s language, with its endless punning and rhyme, its sense of play, and with the sonic weight and density which he discovers and exploits in words like Sein /Being, which is ultimately inextricable from the word’s meaning. Yet as a criticism, this movement away from the body, away from the sensory, goes to the heart of Heidegger’s project, and will be returned to below.
Following Heidegger’s brief discussion of Hölderlin’s language in The Ister , he makes a series of surprising declarations, telling us that Hölderlin’s rivers should not be viewed as symbols of a “deeper” religious content, and that Hölderlin’s poetry must be understood as outside of metaphysics, and outside the essential realm of Western art. 49
Rather than being viewed as a symbol by Heidegger, the river is seen as essentially revealed in an act of ‘poetic unveiling’: the naming of the river, we are told, is of a higher sense in Hölderlin than what is usually understood by the act of ‘naming’ – a poeticised naming means, rather, to call to its essence. This is what Heidegger means by rejecting a symbolic quality to Hölderlin’s work; that a symbol is just a symbol for something else, whereas Hölderlin’s poeticising reveals the river, discloses it in its essence: the river is presented as itself, as part of the ‘earth.’
For Heidegger, this is the nature and function of poetry.
The problem is that reading this text, and other celebrations of Hölderlin, we are never quite sure why poetry as a linguistic discipline should possess this power, why naming a word poetically is to call to its essence that which is named. Although there is an ontologised and spiritualised account of poetry, its ‘mechanics’ as poetry are consistently
49 ibid., 18. 137 ignored. Further emphasising the particularity of the Heideggerian concept of naming is that Goethe and Schiller, great German poets and theorists, who were contemporaries of
Hölderlin, are said to lack this power of naming, and ‘we,’ the readers of Heidegger’s work, cannot know how such a naming comes to pass. 50
At one point he writes: “We consider the first two strophes of the poem “Voice of the
People” in order to assist us in hearing a word of Hölderlin’s concerning the rivers. The poem we shall leave to itself.” 51 That the poem should be left to itself, that interpretation is an act of ‘hearing,’ indicates the disclosive nature of the poem for Heidegger. There is a sense in which the poem as a totality offers us its insights, that it is the full poem which speaks Being, and that our task is not to analyse and interpret, but rather, in this way, to listen.
An alternate reading 52 of ‘The Ister,’ however, might focus on the extended connections that are drawn between the wanderer’s body and the forest, a series of associations uniting the narrator with his environment and linking human culture and the natural world. The forest is said to possess its own cry, which is associated with the nature of the “trial” of wandering. This trial “Has passed through our knees,” 53 Hölderlin writes, his turn of phrase marking the body-nature of the wanderer’s quest, the ache of joints that accompanies a day’s hiking, creating a metaphor for the entry of the quest into the corporeal self, an association of body-self with spirit. The need of relief from the day’s toils, for shelter, emerges elsewhere in the poem, the lines “Gleaming from afar, down there by Olympus,/When he in search of shade/From the sultry isthmus came” 54 opposing ‘shade’ and ‘sultry’ to enforce the soothing of the river and align it with a 50 ibid., 21-3. 51 ibid., 31. 52 The brief reading I offer here is based on the text’s English translation, and so has very limited sensitivities to the sonic qualities of the original work. 53 I, 4. 54 ibid., 5. 138 mythic Olympus, the river’s sensual gleaming a vision of transcendence that joins the mountain dwelling of the gods, so that the reader’s attention shifts from this shining vision, a divine oasis, into shade and relief, and then out into the hot and humid neck of land, and then shifting back a few lines later to a place of “cooling.” This modulation reinforces the sense of the river as both shelter and transcendence.
Throughout the poem there is significant indeterminacy in Hölderlin’s phrasing: he writes, for instance, “long have/We thought what is fitting,” 55 suggestively creating an open field of interpretation that extends from the ontico-spiritual signification that
Heidegger reads into the lines to a plainspoken need for a place to build and dwell, to plant crops and construct a house.
Such suggestive and open-ended meaning structures allow many of the kinds of ontologised and spiritualised readings that Heidegger pursues, and some of Heidegger’s most interesting interpretations of the work come from manoeuvres performed via the exploitation of these moments of poetic indeterminacy. These brief comments do not challenge Heidegger’s enormously rich analysis, and there is much more than could be said of the poem and his commentary – my aim is only to demonstrate the specificity of his interpretation and its assimilation into his work as a whole.
It would seem that Heidegger’s sense of language is so comprehensively ontological that an analysis of the ‘nuts and bolts’ of poetic practice involves a necessarily instrumental view of language that he wishes to avoid. Yet the power of the poem clearly begins within the word, no matter what other possibilities might be found therein, and as we have seen Heidegger’s later texts do explore this question of poetry’s ‘saving power’ as a more explicit question of linguistic negativity and revelation. Heidegger contrasts the
55 ibid., 4. 139 instrumental view of language, which is characterised by a lack of ambiguity, with the poetic act, which is necessarily ambiguous. 56 A genuinely poetic utterance opens onto an illimitable plane of meaning, with each word belonging to a vast range of semantic possibility, in which any absolute definition is impossible. We “must be careful” writes
Heidegger in ‘The Nature of Language,’ “not to force the vibration of the poetic saying into the rigid groove of a univocal statement, and so destroy it”: 57 poetic language, and poetic revelation, lives within this openness, within ambiguity. Heidegger reinforces this in his essay ‘Language and the Poem,’ writing:
We shall hear nothing of what the poem says so long as we bring to it only this or that dull
sense of unambiguous meaning. ... The ambiguous tone of Trakl’s poetry arises out of a
gathering, that is, out of a unison which, meant for itself alone, always remains unsayable.
The ambiguity of this poetic saying is not lax imprecision, but rather the rigor of him who
leaves what is as it is, who has entered into the “righteous vision” and now submits to it. 58
The textual negativity within the poem is here represented as a necessity; a form of rigour which corresponds to a negativity present within the world, the ‘unsayable’ from where the poem arrives. Such rigour opposes a more strictly analytical ‘saying’ because it
‘leaves what it is as it is.’ The ‘unsaid within the said’ points to an unspeakable within the speakable, that which in Romantic discourse might be approached but not redrawn into a logico-discursive re-presentation.
The language of poetry, which frequently seeks to break with semantic meanings to produce the kind of ambiguity Heidegger is addressing, opens upon a virtually illimitable field of meaning: the justification for such imprecision, its naming as a form of rigour, is 56 HPA, 103-4. 57 NL, 64. 58 LP , 192. 140 that some of the meanings produced within this ‘vibration of poetic saying’ are not otherwise articulable. There is correspondence between such ‘vibration’ and the
Romantic fragment: a linguistic proximity to the unfolding flux of ‘what is,’ which is arguably as real yet intangible as the transformations of evening light. The necessity of a polysemous approach to meaning is again seen as vital to the act of ‘truth-telling,’ for a truth within a state of flux, of an unfolding event, is not reducible to one single representation, yet is still presented in some form within this ‘vibration.’ Indirect disclosure is here the only form of disclosure: in the language of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ the “ work lets the earth be an earth. ”59 Such a letting be affects a proximity to what is in its act of meaning creation. Poetic language reveals meaning just as it conceals it, opening new pathways and possibilities of meaning within its expanded structures of signification.
Language is seen as revelatory, as possessing these possibilities, because it retains within it the primordial traces of its birth. Octavio Paz lays out this idea with characteristic clarity:
whatever its express content may be, whatever its concrete meaning, the poetic word
affirms the life of this life. I mean: the poetic act, poetizing, the poet’s utterance –
independently of the particular content of that utterance – is an act that, originally at least,
does not constitute an interpretation, but rather a revelation of our condition. 60
For Paz, it is poetic language particularly that is disclosive, rather than referential. Here, the ability of the poem to penetrate to the origin of a word demonstrates a form of
59 OWA, 172. 60 Octavio Paz, cited in Alvin H. Rosenfeld ‘“The Being of Language and the Language of Being” Heidegger and Modern Poetics’ in Martin Heidegger and the Question of Literature. Bloomington, Indiana University, 1976. 540. 141 disclosure corresponding to the Romantic position. Just as Romanticism offers art as a form of revelation, of truth’s presentation rather than re-presentation, so too then Paz’s words demonstrate a model in which poetic language reveals , rather than reinterprets, the world. Tacitly, Paz’s words also affirm the relation between language and lived experience. We return here to Heidegger’s metaphor of proximity: the language which might reveal the world most directly is that which is closest to the word’s birth, to the birth of meaning.
In the ‘Letter on Humanism,’ Heidegger tells the story of Heraclitus, who, discovered standing warming his hands by the stove by visiting strangers, says “here too the gods are present.” 61
Heidegger’s return to Heraclitus signposts several aspects of his philosophical approach. Broadly, it indicates what has been a central concern since his first writings, and one senses that Heidegger sees an image of himself in Heraclitus, standing by the stove in his hut in the Black Forest, seeking the most elemental of contact with things and finding in such contact the response to a question that resists and problematises language . The stove’s hearth has an expanded cultural, ontological, and spiritual significance for Heidegger, expressing a concrete, almost symbiotic, engagement with an elemental world. For Heidegger, such primordiality is an essential concern: the revelation of the world in language – the stating of truth – relies upon such primordiality. This is to say that for Heidegger, propositional truth, truth as ‘correctness,’ relies on a more primordial truth: “the essence of truth that is familiar to us—correctness in representation—stands and falls with truth as unconcealment of beings.” 62
61 LH, 256. 62 OWA, 177. 142 Such an unconcealment is identified by Heidegger via the Greek word aletheia ;
Heidegger’s reaching back through language is a reaching for a more primordial meaning
– the more originary Greek word is used to identify a more originary form of truth itself.
If language is the substance of thought, of poetic thinking, of Being, and language retains within it the origins of its emergence, then a newly unearthed (in the archaeological sense) word returns to us some of that buried thought. Aletheia is more than simply another name for truth, but is a new way in which truth is to be understood, a new (or, more correctly, ancient and revived) meaning of truth. For Heidegger, to revive the word aletheia is to revive an ancient relationship between truth and art, in which art bore a more primary relation to truth than did the calculative modes of thinking that occur within the technological paradigm.
Poetry performs a similar function.
Within this question of the primordial we can locate more concrete aspects of poetic expression: poetry seeks to break with established structures of language, to work against the overused linguistic combinations that make up the phrases of everyday speech, and it is therefore one means by which we distance ourselves from the ‘tired’ language of metaphysics, as Heidegger puts it. In so doing, poetic language is seen to reach back into this emergent moment of meaning, uncovering the word’s primal coming to be within the world.
Poetry thus enacts an archaeology of meaning.
What is central here is that, the poem, in speaking such primordiality, speaks a language of silence. The indirection of the poem, its negativity, is the essential element of its disclosure.
143 The explorations of Hölderlin’s poetry frequently explore less what is present on the surface of the work, and not even, in any superficial sense, what is beneath that surface, but rather seeks the underlying ground of the work’s revelation, the work’s internal truth
– this is not a truth of correspondence, this or that particular truth, but truth as ontological, spiritual, historical: truth as revealing.
The work reveals the world of the poet, of the German people; it reveals Being inasmuch as it reveals the way Being calls us to itself, reveals our opening upon ‘what is’ as a happening – for the poem is, beyond all else, a kind of happening. We can locate
Heidegger’s shunning of ‘literary-critical’ readings of poems within this silence: what matters is less what the words say, but what they do not; not the words themselves, but the spaces between them .
And so, the exploration of Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister’ can, and does, lead back over
2000 years and into Ancient Greece, and into a discussion of technology and holiness.
The poem is thus seen as the perfect vehicle for an indirect communication, for a communication of silence, for the essential functioning of the poem is conceived in just these terms. Thus Heidegger writes that “there would be, and there is, the sole necessity, by thinking our way soberly into what [Hölderlin’s] poetry says, to come to learn what is unspoken.” 63
What is unspoken in the poem is Being itself, which can only find voice in silence.
In the discussion of the peasant’s shoes in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ it is the visual artwork which performs this function, with Heidegger drawing from the painting the truth of the Being of shoe and wearer, stating that the painting “lets us know what shoes are in truth,”64 and thus the shoes’ “being emerges into the unconcealment of its
63 WPF, 93. 64 OWA, 161. 144 Being.” 65 Again, however, what is demonstrated is a framework of artistic revealing whereby an expressive negativity, what is for Heidegger the necessary place of mystery in any genuine revelation, possesses an orienting ability which keeps humankind in proximity to Being. This indirectly disclosive potential of the painting or poem echoes the ontological negativity of the world, the twofold play of revelation and concealment within its act of self-disclosure. Such a world can never be directly represented.
The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and
unfamiliar things that are at hand . . . World is never an object that stands before us and can
be seen. World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth
and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being. 66
That the happening of world can find no clear representation, that it might only be ‘hinted at’ and must remain ‘the ever non-objective,’ presents to us the indirect path by which our realisation of any ‘essence of world’ must follow. So it is we find something of the essence of the peasant’s life in Van Gogh’s painting, which shows nothing of that life, never presents it as an object, but merely alludes to it via the visible toil apparent in the shoes. We are brought into some kind of proximity with the peasant’s existence, yet without having the subject explicitly presented to us, and without facing the pitfalls of its objectification.
Should the painting attempt to ‘literally’ re-present that world – somehow show the peasant in the midst of his or her land, and demonstrate the extent of the relationships he or she shares with that land, we would gain no more significant a sense of the peasant’s world than we gain by merely looking at these shoes, and in fact quite the opposite. To reveal the world, that is, an indirection is necessary , for the ‘world’ cannot be objectified . 65 ibid., 161. 66 ibid., 170. 145 The world cannot be re-presented as an object. Revelation is found only in surrender to partial concealment, and the earth’s opening is actually a revelation of essential undisclosability. Heidegger writes: “The earth appears openly cleared as itself only when it is perceived and preserved as that which is essentially undisclosable, that which shrinks from every disclosure and constantly keeps itself closed up.” 67 This is a fundamental
Romantic insight. Merleau-Ponty comments of Schelling, for instance, that he “has the idea of a Nature irreducible to any philosophical principles like Cartesian infinite, an obscure principle that even in God, resists the light. He wants to retrieve the pre- reflexive, beyond idealism.” 68
For Heidegger then, perhaps following Schelling, nature has as an innate quality its defiance of philosophico-scientific assessment and measurement. There may be an
‘opening’ upon such revelation, but there remains this interplay of revelation and concealment. We might assess specific qualities of an object – the weight of a rock in the hand compared to its weight on a scale, for example, but we are left with our inability to penetrate into the rock and extract its ‘rockness,’ or perhaps, should a vein of gold run through it, were the gleam of its colour to be analysed and broken down into wavelengths, or the substance represented in terms of atomic structure, what was essentially present within the pre-reflective mode of engagement, the way the seam reveals our world to us, is gone.
We see this structure echoed in a more explicitly spiritual language in ‘The Question
Concerning Technology,’ in which God remains exalted and holy only so long as he preserves the mysteriousness of his distance. 69
67 ibid., 172. 68 Maurice Merleau-Ponty Nature. Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier. Evanston, Northwestern, 2003. 51. Henceforth cited as N. 69 HPA, 43. 146 The artwork and poem, then, are considered in terms of presentation, rather than a re- presentation, in which this breakdown of meaning and essence does not occur. The artist attempts to communicate with what we might think of as a reverse-scientific discourse: instead of breaking things down into abstract qualities, there is rather the summoning of all qualities together to extract an essential quality that maintains within it an element of non-disclosability, to invoke a pre-linguistic, pre-scientific understanding of a thing or being.
Each attempt to penetrate the earth is thus seen as a form of technological mastery, a mastery that takes us no closer to revelation. What makes the earth ‘earth’ is then something which defies this form of assessment, and thus Heidegger writes “ The work lets the earth be an earth .” 70 The “worlding of the world” is to be understood neither as the sum of its parts, nor as some kind of invisible framework deducible from this sum.
This account is holistic, yet implicit to such a holism is a conception whereby such things as ‘earth’ are outside the frameworks that attempt to assess them. The world’s worlding is, in this sense, beyond representation – the “ever non-objective,” 71 but is at the same time a physical absolute, an alive and palpable sense and truth of what is .
For Heidegger, poetry works against this trend. Its innate functioning is to seek a proximity to the mystery: the unsaid, the silent, is the heart of the poem.
Stemming from this discussion, we can see that there are quite practical implications to these abstract ideas of linguistic negativity and the revelatory powers of the artwork. Our relationship with this planet as a physical entity is in part determined by our relationship with its ontological essence and how that essence is understood.
An understanding of the earth, using the word in its common sense, that does not take into account any of the greater spiritual or ontological ‘undisclosables’ we find present 70 OWA, 172. 71 ibid., 170. 147 within Heidegger’s analysis, is the kind of analysis that allows the natural environment to be reduced solely to its value as an economic commodity, neutering arguments that represent it as intrinsically important in and of itself. Such undisclosability, though, is precisely what Heidegger means by ‘earth’: this is the concealed dimension of the clearing of Being which must, by necessity, remain concealed, which requires either the poem or the artwork to reveal such ‘mystery’ in its own terms, as what it is. Again we might cite as an example Hölderlin’s hymn ‘The Ister,’ which on Heidegger’s reading reveals the essence of the river—an essence that is at once environmental, national and historical.
We understand a little better what this means when we consider comments from the
German filmmaker Hans-Jürgen Syberberg in David Barison and Daniel Ross’ film The
Ister (2004) that rivers “have no poetical power today.”72 For us, says Syberberg, rivers lack the mythical impact they had for Hölderlin; such an essence is historical, and cannot be returned to. 73 Similarly, de Beistegui comments that the reason so few of us read poetry today is that the experience required to enter its domain is no longer with us: 74 such works rely on particular forms of engagement, and we have departed from a time when such engagement was an everyday way of being. What Hölderlin’s poem reveals, therefore, is not an abiding essence of river, but a spiritual-historical-ontological truth: within such a truth is not only the river’s movement and flow, but the houses that have been constructed near its banks, the history of the Romans and Greeks who have travelled upon it, the importance of the river as a ‘spiritual presence’ and what this presence means for those who dwell there. The river’s truth is far more than its ‘presence,’ no matter how such a presence is described, and in Heidegger’s reading Hölderlin’s hymn is an
‘opening’ upon such truth. 72 The Ister (film), David Barison and Daniel Ross, Black Box Sound and Image, 2004. Part 2, 1:08:30. 73 This said, it is arguable that the film does exactly what Syberberg claims cannot be done today: render the river poetically. 74 NH, 143. 148
A foregrounding of the world as holy states that, in our dealings with this world, there remains a core that is beyond the calculative possibilities of metaphysical, scientific thinking. This is to say that even if we reject all of Heidegger’s arguments as without merit and disregard his analyses of Hölderlin, the kind of elevation that he is reaching towards, even should it be perceived of as wildly romantic, has value purely in terms of the way it reframes our conception of the world, redrawing the boundaries of importance, of what our engagement with the world means. The essential undisclosability of nature, for instance, allowing this notion to sit unexamined for the moment, can be understood as a basic problem for ecology, and results in an inability to communicate that exists between ecologically positioned social groups and those interested in the business of forestry: to borrow a phrase from Jean-François Lyotard, there is a differend 75 within the language of ‘value.’
The language of metaphysics, of science, based as it is within presence and the objective representation of beings, cannot engage in a discourse of holiness, or of the ontological importance of our bond with nature: the breakdown in communicative possibility here is profound, for the underlying ground of metaphysical or scientific expression cannot attribute importance to what is, for all intents and purposes, absent.
This is true whether we consider nature in terms of a ‘simple’ Romantic holism: that there will always be something within the system that cannot be broken down, that
‘nature will reveal nothing under torture’; or take an aspect within a natural system, such as the Donau, and consider it in these Heideggerian terms of ‘essence,’ with the full ontological, historical and spiritual weight of the river’s place within its environment as
75 Jean François Lyotard The Differend: phrases in dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 149 life-giver to an ecosystem, within culture as a supplier of food and commerce, as an historical place to dwell.
With this in mind, a critical Heideggerian stance might be taken on our own Western, technological, atomised, media-riddled existence: all things are available for a price, with mystery equated to mysticism; there is no wonder, only knowing/not knowing; there are no gifts, only items/commodities; eroticism has been replaced by porn, the ‘science of arousal’ and reduction of eroticism to a ‘sexual arousal resource’; it becomes increasingly difficult to lift our eyes and thinking from the pixelated scientism that surrounds us, and all things are explained through micro-function – from our bodies to the elements of air we breathe, so a machinic sensibility guides our actions: “take these vitamins, step inside this machine, engage with this interface, possess more of this life-giving yet ultimately meaningless medium of exchange.”
Our universe is so entirely filled with micro-explanations that the idea of allowing the
‘whole of things’ to reveal some kind of ineffable truth has become almost entirely foreign; many Westerners engage with a culture which rarely, if ever, lets the world be a world in this Heideggerian sense. Rather, the Western paradigm moves towards a collection and ordering of objects and facts.
In Heideggerian thinking, this is the result of a metaphysical system where all questioning and thought of Being has been subsumed under being, where what is beyond
‘presence’ is considered as entirely absent. If the essential element of human existence is to be found in beings, then what exists is there to be controlled and manipulated by man, and man is the measure of success and failure. For Heidegger, such a view occludes the
‘Beingness’ of the world’s beings, hides the truth of what is by offering the ‘facts’ of
150 what is: facts are represented within a context of manmade creation, within a framework of our own construction.
Within this manifold of interpretation, there is no room for nothingness or absence, for such notions are anathemas to the closed rubric of the system.
The destitution of modernity is its inability to see past the superficial world of being, of presence, and into the ultimate multifacetedness of Being. Technology has a direct role to play in the abandonment of the question of Being, not because it is in essence bad, but because it frames the world and the beings within it in terms of resources, and nothing but resource: all things seem to be accessible and possible, are either representable or non-existent. With the dominance of technology, of Gestell , everything is considered under the umbrella of human capacity for production: the result is that all entities, humans included, show up as resource, a victory of efficiency over humanity, ends over means. 76 With a discourse of technological mastery coming to dominate Western thinking, we approach a form of reason that seeks to break all things down into increasingly meaningless ‘facts’ (for instance, information) by which humankind might control its environment and one another. 77
A large part of this problem is the language by which our world is represented; our inheritance, the language of metaphysics. Heidegger states that all modern thinking seeks to become a science: if he is right, then the end result of what it seeks is that it remains inside a model of human-construction: ‘negative’ forms of knowledge are rejected
76 We should note, however, that Heidegger also identifies the poetic “saving power” as dwelling within enframing. “There was a time” he writes, “when it was not technology alone that bore the name techn ē. . . . There was a time when the bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful was called techn ē. The po ēisis of the fine arts was also called techn ē.” The pathway to another experience of Ereignis, then, and a new form of revealing, might then be found by paying “heed to the essence of technology.” Poetry and technology share a common origin in ‘revealing,’ and it is within such ‘revealing’ that the ‘saving power’ lies. QCT, 337-41. 77 See EoP, 434. 151 outright as the “operational and model-based character of representational-calculative thinking becomes dominant.” 78
It should be emphasised, however, that Heidegger is not encouraging an abandonment of technology, ‘even should such a thing be possible.’ The human way of being is in itself technological, and we simply cannot abandon our nature, even should we so choose. We cannot completely disregard technology, but if we ‘step outside the frame of the technological’ – if, for instance, we allow the language of poetry and art, not that of science, to interpret nature for us – we might re-engage our wonder at unconcealment and be exposed to a more primary relationship with Being. 79
But such an exposure relies upon the recognition of an essential unfathomableness within that interpretation. The task of the poet in destitute times is the task of bringing this unfathomableness to light. Heidegger writes: “Poets are the mortals who, singing earnestly of the wine-god, sense the trace of the fugitive gods, stay on the gods’ tracks, and so trace for their kindred mortals the way towards the turning.” 80 The poet then presents an alternative paradigm; although we may find language such as the ‘singing earnestly of the wine god’ too imbued with genuine mysticism to offer a valuable counter-current to these trends of modernity, the poet’s task is comprehensible in the
(arguably) less loaded terminology of the representation of that which is outside the discourse of enframement and resource.
The task of the poet, then, is to “found the holy.” 81
This idea of holy, however, is not limited to religious or social versions of the sacred, but should be seen in this greater notion of the unfathomable dwelling within our world – 78 ibid., 435. 79 Bate, 2000. 258-9. 80 PLT. 92. 81 I, 138. 152 connecting to those remaining elements which cannot be reduced to the ‘enclosure’ of deductive language. The poem does this because its language is the language of the unspoken, of silence. The poet does not enact a return of the gods, of the holy, but rather the poet’s task is:
the preparation of the possibility of such a return by recovering, retaining, and through the
word, infecting others with the sensibility to experience those, in Hölderlin’s terminology,
‘traces ( Spuren )’ of the holy that still remain with us, left over from the age of the presence
of the gods. 82
Within the expanded implications and possibilities of the poetic we find in Heidegger, this recovering, retaining and infection is to be found not only within poetry itself (which is to say, poetry as it is commonly understood and practised as a literary art) but within all the expanded conceptions of the poetic that emerge in Heidegger’s work – that is, wherever an expressive silence can be heard. Poetic thinking and modes of poetic philosophy, as well as poems themselves, all address such a silence, for they all attempt to translate this irreducible, to bring into visibility the power and mystery of that which is beyond strictly delineated forms of knowledge.
Where such holiness is most urgent as a question here is in its relation to expressive, ontic and ontological negativity and their interaction. We cannot equate the holy with negativity, but such negativity is both a part of the nature of such holiness (as an ontological characteristic), and a necessary element of its representation (as a question of expression). The exclusionary nature of the modern paradigm, for Heidegger, its redrawing of the world in terms of resource, is the occlusion of the holy. The poem and
82 HPA, 99. 153 the artwork are thus seen as important for their focus, their inherent openness to the world’s holiness, and in their nature as a form of presentation/representation that embraces, rather than problematises, negativity.
Heidegger’s Incorporeity
We can see why the poem or artwork are of such importance, yet polemically,
Heidegger dismisses virtually all modern art as nothing but ‘aesthetics’: so long as art is only an aesthetic exercise, people may be inspired or moved, but they will not draw closer to Being. With this elevation of art to such a foundational role, and the departure from the aesthetic response induced by the work, we come to see why Heidegger’s approach to art shuns its sensory elements, assigning the artist an ontological function that is in many respects external to the more immediate response the work elicits.
When art is reduced to sensory experience, it is for Heidegger purely a subjective experience [Erfahrung ], one forgets art’s ontological, truth disclosing power. As he says,
“perhaps experience is the element in which art dies.” 83 This movement away from aesthetics is part of the movement away from metaphysics, as in Heidegger’s assessment aesthetics is a result of metaphysical thinking, and metaphysics, as we have seen, directs us away from the truth of Being. Thus throughout Heidegger’s writings on the poem or the object of art, there is a constant movement away from any examination of the sensuous elements by which the artwork is engaged, for the consideration of art in this way – as a consideration of sensuous beauty – is innately metaphysical.
83 PLT, 77. 154 This movement away from the sensuous elements of the work, however, characterises a movement away from sensuous or corporeal engagements generally, which although understandable within this discourse of metaphysical thinking might be seen to miss something fundamental about the nature of poetry and of language itself.
We see a concrete example of this in Heidegger’s discussion of Rilke and his rejection of the animality which is so integral to Rilke’s poetic. Part of his dissatisfaction with
Rilke’s poetry is in its elevation of the animal elements of human nature. For Rilke, pre- reflexive animality offers a counter-current to metaphysics, achieving an access to ‘the open’ that the thinking subject is not able to achieve.
For Heidegger, however, “the human body is something essentially other than an animal organism” 84 – a distancing that is central to his thinking. Part of the problem he perceives with metaphysics is that it understands man as a ‘thinking animal,’ diminishing what he sees as the essential difference between ‘man and beast,’ and encouraging an understanding which diminishes humankind’s proximity to Being: this he perceives of as one wrong turn on the path of metaphysics that has led to the current impasse, the overcoming of which is a principal concern. As we shall see, this marks a substantial opposition between Heidegger’s work and that of Merleau-Ponty.
There is significant scholarship on the subject of animality in Heidegger, and here I would like to emphasise only this consistent deviation from questions of the sensory. 85
Whether or not Heidegger’s assessment of aesthetics as a metaphysical construct is correct, however, it needs to be said that the artwork and the poem speak the language of
84 LoH, 228. For a fuller discussion of animality in Heidegger see Stuart Elden ‘Heidegger’s Animals’ Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 39, 2006. 273-91. 85 The bulk of commentary concerns Heidegger’s substantial discussion in: Martin Heidegger The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1995. See also: Elden 2006. 273-91. 155 the senses: they speak, in part, of an interplay that human beings and animals share, a point before the word finds its meaning, an inarticulate cry that dwells within the world’s inherent meaning. One point to be made here is that the sensory ‘web’ is the initial architecture of meaning – the point at which meaning enters the word, and as such speaks of the relationship between word and world. We will discuss this further in the following chapters.
It might be argued, then, that in searching for the greater ontological reach and scope of the artwork, Heidegger misses the significance of its sensory aspects, and how they might relate to his greater ontological project.
This neglect of the sensory illustrates an underlying bodilessness in Heidegger’s work that goes back to his account of Dasein in Being and Time , where he writes only that the
“‘bodily nature’ hides a whole problematic of its own, though we shall not treat it here.” 86
Indeed, the problematic of the ‘bodily nature’ remains essentially untreated but for a series of seminars Heidegger began around 1960. 87 Kevin Aho argues that an account of embodiment is secondary to Heidegger’s inquiry into Being because it remains a purely ontic inquiry to do with the characteristics and capacities of beings, rather than Being as such, and as a result is not a question for the fundamental ontology that is Heidegger’s goal. 88
Although such an argument might hold water in excusing the general absence of an analysis of corporeal situatedness in Heidegger’s work, it fails to address the issues of bodily response as it relates to the poem or the artwork and their place in the revelation of
Being. The painting’s ability to ‘open up a world’ to us is partly a result of its form as
86 BT, 143. 87 See Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars , trans. Frans Mayer and Richard Askay. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2001. 88 Kevin A. Aho ‘The Missing Dialogue between Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty: On the Importance of the Zollikon Seminars ’ in Body and Society . Vol. 11, No. 2. 2. 156 painting. The artwork and poem function not via the quasi-theological leanings that
Heidegger frequently attributes to them, but by engaging us at some kind of pre- linguistic, embodied point of contact. They engage us, at one level, as sensory phenomena, and one would think that understanding their act of revelation is at least partly to comprehend them as such phenomena.
The disappearance of the sensory elements of artwork and poem contrasts with the emphasis we find in Heidegger on a rootedness to presence and locality, which must begin with a definitive, which is to say sensory, engagement with place.
Jeff Malpas, for instance, argues for an understanding of Being that is located specifically around such ideas of locality, positing that “being emerges only in and through place.” 89 We can see such a reading supported by the emphasis on place we find in such essays as ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ and ‘Poetically, Man Dwells,’ in which place gains a concrete sense of locality. In the former, the everyday structure of a bridge over a stream is brought into the thinking of Being90 – the title of the essay itself opens this relationship between the building as a constructed space and dwelling as a more expansive concept. Typical of Heidegger, this movement is achieved via an etymological retrieval that discovers in the Old English and High German word for building, buan, a meaning of dwelling: the contemporary German word for building, bauen, having lost this signification. 91 Heidegger goes on to say that the “ fundamental character of dwelling ” is in fact “ sparing and preserving .” 92 There is a connection created, then, via this particular linguistic retrieval, between the physical structure and act of building and the expanded ontological significance of what it means to dwell. The opening paragraph
89 Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2006. 6. 90 Martin Heidegger ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York, Perennial Classics, 2001. 150. Henceforth cited as BDT. 91 ibid., 145. 92 ibid., 147. 157 of ‘Poetically, Man Dwells’ takes us, via Hölderlin, to a steeple and metal roof, 93 man- made constructions that integrate the spiritual and the practical, the infinite and the local.
The concept of dwelling has its nucleus within such locality and integration.
For Heidegger, dwelling describes the correct human relation to the world’s holiness; it is the essence of our relationship to the earth, of our guardianship of that earth. 94 A focus on the sensory engagement with that earth is therefore to name only a manifestation of
Being, a facet of dwelling, but what matters is the underlying ground of such an engagement. Likewise with the poem or artwork, what is important is less methodology – less, in a sense, the work as an object – but the degree to which, and way in which, the work reveals Being. With this in mind, we might understand why the question of language for Heidegger might find most complete expression within silence, for an expressive silence might carry all meanings, might offer an essence of language that is lost within the particularity of utterance.
For Heidegger, the ontological dimension of language is the most important: language is a privileged mode by which the human being stands in the openness of Being – it is not merely a tool for information transfer. 95 Such silence is the ontological in language inasmuch as the interplay of silence and what is other than silence (that is, the expressed/unexpressed, meaning/non-meaning, presence/absence) echoes the interplay of the concealing/revealing of Being.
We can see, therefore, why language’s sensory dimension would be considered as secondary, for what is important for Heidegger is not its surface, its presence, but rather the absences it reveals.
93 Martin Heidegger ‘Poetically, Man Dwells’ in Poetry, Language, Though, trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York, Perennial Classics, 2001. 211. 94 HLP, 91-2. 95 NH, 104. 158 That is, the truth of Being comes into language via the ‘vibration of poetic saying’ – via the work’s absence and through its moments of indeterminacy. There is a necessary coincidence, therefore, of ontological and expressive negativity , and even where
Heidegger is not explicitly exploring the indirectly disclosive nature of the poem as a linguistic question, there is a consistent focus on the revelatory power of the poem’s unsaid. In a variety of senses, therefore, poetry offers an answer.
The suspicion of scientism and the foregrounding of analyses that do not fall within a strictly logico-discursive field of articulation demonstrate a Romantic inheritance that
Heidegger shares with Maurice Merleau-Ponty. For both, the inadequacy of our means of re-presenting truth within such a field indicates something fundamental about the nature of existence and its primordial ground, and also evidences the limit and scope of the traditional pathways by which such truth might be engaged.
Yet Heidegger’s inquiry, as substantial as it is, fails to articulate some essential elements of the relationship between our physical being, our sensory experience, and how such experience is articulated. Although we see a corresponding movement towards some kind of primordial ground in the work of Merleau-Ponty, in Merleau-Ponty we discover none of the apparent conflict between language’s materiality (or, for that matter, the material nature of the artwork) and its place within the structures of ontological foundation, such as we find in Heidegger.
Contra Heidegger, for Merleau-Ponty such materiality must be at the centre of any inquiry, for it is through our material existence that knowledge of the world arrives. In
Merleau-Ponty, it is not only that our opening upon the world is a sensory one, that our engagement with phenomena is sensorily structured; rather, language is a sensory, embodied, material phenomenon which is ‘of the world’ in a concrete sense. Our engagement with the poem, therefore – which by any interpretation foregrounds and
159 exploits the material dimensions of language – is necessarily sensuous. What we read in
Heidegger as a failure to adequately recognise the material aspects of our knowing and being, in Merleau-Ponty is the very commencement and centre of inquiry. Although both take varying modes of indirect, open and fragmentary discourse, such as those that emerge in Romanticism, as central aspects of their work, they differ markedly in how such modalities are theorised and employed.
The following chapter will explore the centrality of embodiment in Merleau-Ponty’s approach to these questions of language, primordiality and meaning. As we shall see, amongst the significant differences between these two thinkers there are also remarkable similarities. Although their methodologies and theoretical stances are frequently very different, the origins of their questions and the spaces towards which their answers reach share much common ground.
160
Ce qui n’est pas ineffable n’a aucune importance.
Paul Valéry, Mon Faust
161 162 5
Merleau-Ponty
Silence & Être Sauvage
Romanticism’s optimistic refrain is that although coming to know the world as a philosophical certainty remains problematic, such a knowing should not be thought of as subservient to religious faith and assigned to the realms of impossibility. 1 Rather, that which, for Kant, is knowable only to God, needs re-imagining: not as a religious infinite, but as a boundary which delimits certain forms of philosophical discourse, where other forms of argument, of reasoning, writing or creative practice need to be employed. We see this Romantic re-conceptualisation of thought taken up by Heidegger in quite specific, albeit varied, ways.
This chapter will position Merleau-Ponty within the preceding discussion by interweaving a brief genetic account of his work with some of its parallels to the writings of Heidegger. Following this introductory discussion will be a thematic study of Merleau-
Ponty’s thought, focused on the question of expression. In particular, we will explore the problematic of embodiment, world and language, and the emergence and development of the concept of ‘silence.’ The final section will offer an explicit analysis of the concept of the flesh and how it might be located in this schema of expression. This will lead to the inquiry into nature and primordial meaning that opens Chapter 6. Texts will be examined
1 From Page 161. “That which is not ineffable does not have any importance.” Quoted in William Frank, ‘Varieties and Valences of Unsayability’ in Philosophy and Literature. Vol. 29, 2005, 489-97. 163 more or less chronologically, which will also allow us to locate the emergence and development of key themes.
We find significant convergence between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger in their approach to the problem of ‘representation,’ especially concerning the use and theorisation of ‘indirect’ forms of expression. It is principally this common deployment of expressive negativity which motivates their juxtaposition here, yet as we shall see, although there are areas of convergence in their work, there are significant differences in how negativity is thematised and employed.
Inasmuch as both philosophers begin their work in Husserl, any common ground between them is perhaps unsurprising. It is Heidegger who deviates most significantly from Husserl’s teachings, yet even in the great departure we find in Being and Time ,
Heidegger’s way of engaging his subject, the phenomenological analysis by which he breaks down Dasein’s way of being, indicates his indebtedness. 2 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty writes, in the preface of The Phenomenology of Perception , that “the whole of Sein und
Zeit . . . amounts to no more than an explicit account of the ‘natürlicher Weltbegriff’ or the ‘Lebenswelt’ which Husserl, towards the end of this life, identified as the central theme of phenomenology.” 3
Both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty attempt to articulate a primordial opening upon experience – a point of articulation between subject and world – yet each conceives of it entirely differently. Whereas for the former this ground is understood negatively, for the latter it is always of the earth. This is not ‘earth’ as a dialectical or poetic concept, such as it is in Heidegger, but rather is the physical milieu which we contact each passing day: a ground upon which we walk and dwell, literally as well as ontologically. 2 Heidegger was, for example, editing Husserl’s lecture on the phenomenology of internal time- consciousness (with Edith Stein) while drafting Being and Time. 3 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception , trans. Colin Smith. London, Routledge, 2002. viii. Henceforth cited as PhP, and abbreviated as the Phenomenology in the body of the text. 164
This is emphasised in an examination of the huge scope of Merleau-Ponty’s work, beginning as it does with the behavioural and psychological studies of The Structure of
Behaviour ,4 and increasingly forging a new ground, always based in embodied life, between the natural sciences and philosophy. In this sense, Merleau-Ponty remains ‘true’ to phenomenology in a way that Heidegger does not. It is argued by Renaud Barbaras, amongst others, that throughout his writings Merleau-Ponty is seeking to complete the phenomenological project that Husserl had begun, 5 with Merleau-Ponty identifying, in
‘The Philosopher and His Shadow,’ 6 a descent “towards Nature” 7 in Husserl’s later writings, a descent which we see increasingly mirrored by Merleau-Ponty towards the end of his life.
Merleau-Ponty’s orientation to what we might term ‘Romantic thought’ is less immediately apparent than Heidegger’s and remains grounded in a form of corporeality that is absent in Heidegger. The ‘flesh,’ for instance, is part ontology and part physicality.
Where it articulates a transcendence, in Merleau-Ponty’s endless quest to break down dualisms, what we are confronted with is rather the immanent transcendence of a presence to come. Barbaras writes that the “heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical inquiry is therefore the movement by which a living being transcends its materiality and gives rise to meaningful existence and, conversely, the fact that every meaning, whatever its degree of abstraction, has its roots in corporeal life.” 8 Although both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger begin their projects in an exploration of the ontic link between subject and 4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty The Structure of Behaviour , trans. Alden L. Fisher. London, Methuen, 1965. Henceforth cited as SB. 5 See Renaud Barbaras ‘A Phenomenology of Life’ in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty . Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. 208. 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Philosopher and His Shadow’ in Signs , trans. Richard C. Mcleary. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. See especially 160-6. Henceforth cited as PS. 7 Vallier, 2000. 83. 8 Barbaras, 2005. 211. 165 world, and in both philosophers there is a pronounced turn to the ontological, a turn which concerns itself with this primordial grounding of existence as the philosophical question, and a question which cannot be addressed by traditional discourse, Merleau-
Ponty’s consistent movement back into corporeality, his rooting within perceptual experience of the dynamic of immanence and transcendence, offers a concrete living ground for his ideas that is absent in Heidegger.
Another link between the two is the special role offered to the artist: for both philosophers, the work of art in some form or other is able to address questions before which philosophy finds itself mute. Yet their way of engaging with the arts, the ‘promise and possibility’ they identify within the artwork, contrast sharply. For Heidegger it is the exemplar of Hölderlin which represents the artist/philosopher approaching the meaning of Being in articulating our way of ‘dwelling’ upon the earth; in Merleau-Ponty it is visual artists in particular, and especially Cézanne, who are seen as articulating theories of perception and Being within their work.9
One way in which the ‘possibilities’ of art are played out is in the form of the linguistic work itself. Language is problematised almost from the outset with Heidegger, and is brought into an increasingly critical relation by Merleau-Ponty as his work matures. Both philosophers create their later works upon lyrically, metaphorically and imagistically rich linguistic landscapes. A central question here is why two such apparently different philosophers find it necessary to move their exploration of thought into a linguistic frame that so closely approximates that of poetry. We have already examined Heidegger’s
9 He begins his essay on the ontology of painting, ‘Eye and Mind,’ with the following citation from J. Gasquet’s Cézanne : “What I am trying to convey to you is more mysterious; it is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of sensations.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’ in Galen A. Johnson ed. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting , trans. ed. Michael B. Smith. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1993. 121. Henceforth EM. 166 elevation of poetic language, but on several occasions Merleau-Ponty also states the need for a philosophical language that is close to that of poetry. 10
The following chapter will explore at length a Merleau-Pontian ‘poetics’ which, as we will see, coincides closely with his ontology of the flesh: what needs to be emphasised at this stage is that, like Heidegger, this ‘poeticism’ is a vital strategy in his attempt to articulate the fundamental irreducibility and ambiguity of our relationship with the world.
Barbaras, echoing Merleau-Ponty’s own assessment of Heidegger, writes: “Merleau-
Ponty’s purpose is to develop a phenomenology that takes into account the irreducibility of the [Husserlian] lifeworld.” 11 Merleau-Ponty’s linguistic and textual strategies play an important part in how he attempts to realise this purpose. In order to properly ground the discussion of how this is achieved, the following section will offer a thematic study of
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, centring on the phenomenon of expression.
From Corporeal Irreducibility to the Foundation of Expression
One essential insight we gain from Merleau-Ponty, an insight pivotal to our understanding of his theory of expression and at the centre of the overall argument of this thesis, is the problem inherent to understanding consciousness as though we were disembodied subjects.
The fact of our embodiment means that our way of being is one of endless exchange with the world; an interrelation and flux within which are produced all our structures of meaning and expression. For Merleau-Ponty, the experience of one’s own body reveals
10 N, 71. See also The Visible and the Invisible , ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1968. 125. Henceforth cited as VI. 11 Barbaras, 2005. 208. 167 an irreducible quality at the core of existence, and reveals a corresponding irreducibility in expression. For Merleau-Ponty this irreducibility extends into all facets of human existence, for all facets are inextricably tied to the body. One’s body is not an object; we cannot deconstruct it and in the act of reconstruction create a thing of clarity:
Its unity is always implicit and vague. It is always something other than what it is, always
sexuality and at the same time freedom, rooted in nature at the very moment when it is
transformed by cultural influences . . . experience of one’s own body runs counter to the
reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other, and which gives us
only the thought about the body, or the body as an idea, and not the experience of the body
or the body in reality. 12
The dualism of mind and body, a dualism that Merleau-Ponty, perhaps more than any other philosopher, has been concerned to deconstruct, is thus problematised by our experience of embodiment itself – a bodily experience that also illustrates the verbal limits of reflexivity, with expression founded in the very act of body/world exchange that offers us this ‘vague’ unity.
The indeterminacy located via embodiment is essential to Merleau-Ponty’s thought and a vital point of departure from Husserlian phenomenology. This distinction is that perception is not made up purely of ‘sense data,’ as it is in Husserl, as sense data for
Merleau-Ponty cannot make the figure/ground distinction: that is, although they may offer us packets of information, the conceptualising of such information so that it becomes meaningful requires more than simply ‘data.’ We require, rather, some ‘positive’ sense of the data we do not possess – the unseen, the invisible – in order that our perceptual experience of the visual has meaning; the hidden side of the object
12 PhP, 231. 168 contributing to our determination of the object; or, to borrow a previous metaphor, the moon’s darkened side filling out for us what is visible. 13
Such indeterminacy is phenomenological, is of sensory origin: vision always contains the unseen, not as a yet-to-be-examined, but as that which textures the seen, which fills- out its third dimension. Although it is in the context of vision that Merleau-Ponty claims
“we must recognise the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon,” 14 this indeterminacy does not stop with vision, but finds a degree of relation to all of Merleau-Ponty’s thinking.
Merleau-Ponty states that The Phenomenology of Perception and The Structure of
Behaviour “sought to restore the world of perception.” 15 Yet by Merleau-Ponty’s own assessment, “the study of perception could only teach us a “bad ambiguity,” “a mixture of finitude and universality, of interiority and exteriority.” He goes on to say, however, that
there is a “good ambiguity” in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which
accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate
elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the
present, nature and culture into a single whole. To establish this wonder would be
metaphysics itself and would at the same time give us the principle of an ethics. 16
When we read of recognising the indeterminate as a ‘positive phenomenon,’ of discovering the ‘good ambiguity’ of expression, the nature of our problem becomes clearer: the movement from the inherently ‘vague’ unity of the body, from the ambiguity 13 Sean Dorrance Kelly, ‘Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty’ in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau- Ponty , ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. 80-1. 14 PhP, 7. 15 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘An Unpublished Text by Maurice Merleau-Ponty: A Prospectus of His Work’ trans. Arleen B. Dallery in The Primacy of Perception . Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. 3. Henceforth cited as UP. 16 ibid., 11. 169 of expression, is one which seeks to ally itself with that very moment of flux that is the body/subject’s engagement with the world – a living ground of Being that is anchored by perception itself, in which ideas of expression, meaning, world, body and truth all coalesce. This will be the central line of inquiry for the remainder of this chapter.
Merleau-Ponty, in the expansive metaphoric web of this thinking, presents the human organism as if it were a fractal; the body’s vision and touch extending out and folding back upon itself, with meaning emerging from within this exchange. To experience existence is first and foremost to experience corporeality and intercorporeality; the experience of an organism linked to its environment. It is from this perspective that we might commence any further understanding. For Merleau-Ponty, then, communicative exchange is more than a linguistic exchange between subjectivities: it is, firstly, as an exchange of language, an exchange grounded in our physical relation with the world, and within perception itself, which is a communicative reciprocity between the subject and its environment, an exchange which transcends, indeed which founds, language, and illustrates the very grounding of our way of being in the world.
From Body to Language: Expression in The Structure of Behaviour and The Phenomenology of Perception.
In The Structure of Behaviour , the corporeality which will become so definitive in the
Phenomenology is grounded in an interrogation of behaviouralist studies and gestalt psychology. Along with a sustained attack on various forms of dualism, Merleau-Ponty offers a substantial interrogation of scientism, yet the text both relies on and encourages forms of scientific method. Empirical knowledge has its place – what is criticised is the
170 lack of scientific engagement with lived experience, that what ‘must be true’ is decided as a result of available scientific theory. 17 At stake is the possible expression of the relationship between the pre-objective and the objective world. The pre-objective world is here understood as that which is founded in perceptual experience, the “not-yet- articulated or not-yet-reified world of primordial experience”: 18 outside language and reduction. By contrast the objective world is understood as that which is opened through language and dependent on linguistically expressed causal relationships: it is “the outcome of our applying the concepts and articulations of experience which we gain intersubjectively.” 19
For Merleau-Ponty these two are linked, are part of the same ontological space: 20 without the interplay of pre-objective and objective, any discussion of the pre-objective is moot – neither can we understand a linguistically defined objective space through its relation to the pre-objective, nor can we envisage a form of access to the pre-objective through philosophical expression. This relationship is explored through the emergence of expression within a child:
Whether the child contemplates their external and visual appearance or whether he grasps
their motor actualization in his own body, the question still remains of knowing how an
irreducible unity of meaning is apprehended through these materials. . . . it is a question of
describing the emergence of an indecomposable signification in the moment of experience
itself 21
17 See, for example, SB, 129-30, 140-1. 18 See Stan van Hooft ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Problem of Intentional Explanation’ in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 40, No. 1. Sep. 1979. 34. 19 ibid. 20 ibid., 47. 21 SB, 170. 171 This question then becomes of the relationship between the two – of expression’s emergence within phenomenological experience. What is this movement from the body’s physical and physico-sensory architecture, from this ‘irreducible unity of meaning,’ into language? What is the gap between living and a language-bound ‘knowing’? What, in
Merleau-Ponty’s words, “is the relation between consciousness as universal milieu and consciousness enrooted in the subordinated dialectics?” 22
There is no easy response to offer here, and we will spend the following chapters exploring this question and its implications. What might be highlighted at this point, which articulates a theme that is present in Romantic philosophy and in Heidegger, is that for Merleau-Ponty there are different ways of knowing. Consciousness, Merleau-Ponty writes, “is a network of significative intentions which are sometimes clear to themselves and sometimes, on the contrary, lived rather than known .” 23
What is being described is a truth based in pre-linguistic experience: a separation of a linguistic or logic based knowing and that which is experienced at the level of body. Yet, as emphasised above, the relationship between the two is not one of distinct separation. In order for Merleau-Ponty’s project to remain valid, these two must be in communication.
What is required is an explication of expression that takes account of the relation between lived experience and the symbolic order, one that works towards the collapse of a dichotomised model of knowledge.
We can see that it is not without significance, then, that in the opening paragraph of the
Phenomenology’s chapter ‘The Body as Expression, and Speech,’ Merleau-Ponty writes that it is in describing the phenomenon of speech and the act of meaning that we might for once and all leave behind the traditional subject-object dichotomy. 24 It is within this
22 ibid., 184. 23 ibid., 173. My emphasis. 24 PhP, 202. 172 text that the unity of body and world first begins to be fully articulated and that language receives its first thorough interrogation.
What emerges is an understanding of language that, stated ‘in reverse,’ stretches from the word through the body and back into the world as a site of origin/meaning; ‘all the way down,’ to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s turn of phrase, so that it encompasses all the strata of world and Being. This formulation of language is most clearly summarised in the chapter’s title, the fulcrum of which is the startling simplicity of the word as ; this is not a body that might speak, or can speak; rather, it is a body that is speech, a body for which speech is a primary mode of being.
The body is not only the site of speech, but a pillar of its foundation.
We read in the Phenomenology that the gesture of anger, for example, does not signify anger, but is anger itself. 25 When facing another angry human, we do not read some psychic disharmony behind the gestures of the body, some hidden sign; rather, the screwed-up face, the clenching of the fists, the puffing of the chest: these gestures are anger expressed through the body. Likewise, if we reverse his example and turn the spotlight on ourselves, when we feel the tightening of the chest and throat, the raising of the shoulders, small spasms of the muscles, we do not experience some moment of reflexivity from which we identify the emotion: “Ahh, yes, this is anger...” Rather, we live those moments as anger, as the emotion taken physical form within (and with-out) the body.
Such a reading of emotional gesture removes reflective cognition from this aspect of bodily expression and binds the gesture to the world in concrete terms.
25 ibid., 214. 173 The consequences of this extend beyond their implications for language, for speech and meaning and their relationship with the body, but might be seen as representative of the pre-reflexive holism with which Merleau-Ponty conceives of our enfolded presence within the world, a relation without which our engagement with the world as embodied subjects is inconceivable. It is the holism of body within the world that is epitomised in gesture that allows the unity that the Phenomenology foregrounds. One can see the meaning of a gesture, and one lives the response to that meaning as something prior to thought, no matter what cognition may follow.
This gestural sense is referred to as the “emotional content” 26 of the word, thus we see here the establishment of a concrete link between word and meaning: if the gesture means anger, joy, confusion, excitement, or whatever else it might be, and that gesture remains in some way present within the word, the link between signifier and signified is not problematic.
We should point out, however, that when Merleau-Ponty writes of language originating in gesture and extending through the body in this way, he is talking about the formation of speech in the subject: the cultural dimension of language remains implicit.
We might say without too much argument that language begins here (in gesture), but it is equally certain that the development of a language does not end here: language is a cultural formation and institution, and we cannot forget that enormous differences exist between various languages and their expression of the same phenomena. Thus to write of this link between gesture and word does not intend to ignore cultural differences, but means to emphasise that despite them, the link between gesture and word is not arbitrary, but is a way, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, to “sing the world”; that the meaning “inhabits the word.” 27
26 ibid., 217. 27 ibid., 224. 174 Thus Merleau-Ponty writes:
What nature does not provide, cultural background does. Available meanings, in other
words former acts of expression, establish between speaking subjects a common world, to
which the words being actually uttered in their novelty refer as does the gesture to the
perceptible world. 28
For Merleau-Ponty the differences in expression between one culture and another do not point to an arbitrariness of signifier and signified. Their divergence is rather seen as indicative of the infinite variety of ways in which their common origin (i.e. the one root way of being in the world) might be articulated. It is for this reason, he says, that the full meaning of one language is not translatable into another: the body may express the world in myriad ways, and within the words is compressed the “history of a whole language.” 29
Thus although we are emphasising this link between gesture and word, the relation is still one embedded in the culture that gave rise to it – “it is no more natural . . . to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table ‘a table.’”30
This bringing-out of language through the body, whereby the physicality of the subject’s surroundings are translated first into a kind of material presence by the body, which births them then as word, will remain a cornerstone of Merleau-Ponty’s thought, and will be developed across various emphases in the following chapters.
Interestingly, it is not only in the origins of expression that Merleau-Ponty emphasises the importance of corporeality: in a communicative exchange, others likewise understand this body-originating communication at the level of their bodies. The Phenomenology states that conceptual meaning is formed via a “kind of deduction from gestural meaning, 28 ibid., 216-7. 29 ibid., 218. 30 ibid., 220. 175 which is immanent in speech.” 31 Merleau-Ponty solidifies this by a discussion of the way in which language is learned; that is, within fields of action and community. So when words themselves are not completely understood, what is transferred is a contextual meaning, either through a particular style of writing or speech, a posture, an intonation, or some other characteristic of expression, and it is in this way, within this larger contextual field, that language carries a meaning from page or mouth to other. For Merleau-Ponty this suggests ‘a thought in speech’ that exists ‘unsuspected’ within the subject. Meaning arrives at the juncture of body and world, is created in the act of speech itself.
Communication occurs through the body’s possession of language as the ‘verbal images’ or remnant traces of words spoken or heard.
The body forms meaning and language as a single organism, which is breathed into the world.
Language thus suggests for Merleau-Ponty that our experience of subjectivity is always one of immersion within our environment and engagement with other subjects. To be present in the world is, as Husserl put it, an experience of intersubjectivity. 32 It is this joining of sensibility, of sensing with sensible, that makes our experience one of intracorporeality. The word is part of this intracorporeal relation, is not an abstract, ethereal thing: its presence is physical, both on the page, where its line holds a density of ink, and in the air, where its vibration carries it from mouth to ear.
It is via these multiple lines of intercorporeal connection that the body comes to be understood as a point at which meaning is contextually determined. In the brief chapter entitled ‘The Synthesis of Ones Own Body’ we read:
31 ibid., 208. 32 ibid., xiv. 176 A novel, a poem, a picture or musical work are individuals, that is, beings in which the
expression is indistinguishable from the thing expressed, their meaning, accessible only
through direct contact, being radiated with no change of their temporal and spatial situation.
It is in this sense that our body is comparable to a work of art. It is a nexus of living
meanings 33
In the following chapter, ‘The Body as Expression and Speech’ Merleau-Ponty writes:
The process of expression, when it is successful, does not merely leave for the reader and
the writer himself a kind of reminder, it brings the meaning into existence as a thing at the
very heart of the text, it brings to life an organism of words, establishing it in the writer and
reader as a new sense organ, opening a new field or a new dimension to our experiences. 34
Looking at these two citations together emphasises the parallel means by which Merleau-
Ponty represents the synthesis of the body and that of the artwork. Both these extracts hint towards the idea of the flesh that will be developed in the later work, and both might be read as originating in a holistic Romantic model of the ‘artwork’ and expression. The body and the artwork are both seen here to express that which is entirely individual and ultimately irreducible. The form of these citations is also interesting, with a resonance between their metaphors. In both passages, the relation drawn between the biological organism and the artwork (be it the novel, poem, picture or musical work of the first passage, or the ‘written text’ of the second) present a fluid (i.e. two-way) sense of transformation: the work of art models the body, which models the work of art, which models the body, and so on. This organic, contextual model of meaning is essential to
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of meaning as a kind of holism.
33 ibid., 175. 34 ibid., 212. 177 There are several further points that are both central and exterior to this. The first concerns the nature of this ‘new dimension’ of meaning. Merleau-Ponty follows the second of these citations by saying that the musical sonata brings into being a meaning that is inseparable from the sounds which are its vehicle – comments that echo Novalis’ alignment of poetic meaning and music. 35 The next example which follows is of theatre, and the next, of painting. In each, what matters is the ability to express the world: it is the same, we are told, with thought’s transformation into language: words being not the clothing of thought, but its very form. 36
There are echoes here of Heidegger’s positioning of the artwork as revealing, as that which ‘opens up a world,’ writing of the presence of truth within the work that “ Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment. ”37 For Heidegger the work is itself a happening of truth, an irreducible expression of the world, with the beauty of the work being a revelation of that work.
In the Phenomenology , the problem of the gap between signifier and signified is yet to emerge. Eugenio Donato, in his essay ‘Language, Vision and Phenomonality,’ 38 states that Merleau-Ponty’s early work conceives of language on the model of vision, stating that in the Phenomenology , signifier and signified tend to be essentially continuous, that the physicality of language disappears in the act of its utterance. Expression is itself a holistic unity of subject and world: “the meaning swallows up the signs,” 39 allowing language to be seen as uniting both subject and world and subject and other. Locating the originating moment of language within the gesture thus “postulates the spatial continuity” of the subject and object at the same time as it indicates their separation. 35 Bowie, 1997. 68-9. 36 PhP, 213. 37 OWA, 181. 38 Eugenio Donato. ‘Language, Vision and Phenomenology: Merleau-Ponty as a test case’ in MLN , Vol. 85, Number 6, Comparative Literature , Dec 1970. 803-14. 39 PhP, 212. 178 The differing forms of expression we find in language and the various arts only reinforce this unity. 40 Such a unity is reconsidered in the later realignment of the question of language, with painting finding increasing emphasis as the expressive medium that is able to produce new meanings, to draw out the primordial origins of meaning.
Implicit in this ‘bringing meaning into existence’ is a particular view of the artwork, be it painting, sculpture, novel or poem, which sees it as bringing into being a meaning that would otherwise not exist – an evocation which parallels that evocation of truth that is offered by the artwork in the Romantic ideal. In this way, we understand the work as an unparalleled act of creative expression, the meaning of which, contained within the whole work, encompasses the act of creation, its circumstances, its literal and figurative truth; in fact the entire context to which it belongs.
Not only do we locate an original meaning in each text, but within this consideration is an understanding of the text as an indivisible totality: to borrow this favoured metaphor from Merleau-Ponty, an organism . Its meaning is thus its entirety , an individual truth, which possesses that particular spark of originality, like a form of life, and which cannot be reduced to the ‘sum of its parts.’ The artwork is a body, then, in its indivisibility, in its originality of expression and the inherent quality of its meaning. This idea moves beyond the Romantic holism which it suggests, however, and we might see it extend through all of Merleau-Ponty’s work: the text, then, as a metaphor for the organism of language or the subject itself.
Further, if its meaning is its entirety, it cannot be other than the creation of new meaning, for to say otherwise would be to say either that it is without meaning, or that its meaning is entirely reducible to its symbolic structure – pages, paragraphs, words, letters,
40 Donto, 1970. 808-9. 179 semi-colons – a kind of literary equation, in which one text might add up to another provided the appropriate arrangement is offered.
With this in mind, one way this holistic conception of language might be read is as an attack on logical positivism and the demand for empirically demonstrable linguistic truths. Each text, in this sense, has its own truth, its own life, but none is reducible to rigorous standards of verification. Literature can never be a quasi-mathematical ‘truth equation’ which might produce one fixed meaning: the word always goes back into the world, a world that is absolute, yet in a state of perpetual change.
This is not to deny the word’s relation with its meaning, but to stress that the nature of that relation only maintains significance if this point of communication between word and world remains open. Once the meaning of a sign is stable, fixed, it can be understood to express strictly verifiable truths. But the sign’s meaning can only be fixed in relation to other signs. The ‘fixing’ of meaning that is necessary for the word to say something that is not only ‘true,’ but which is a stable, unchanging truth, is by definition impossible if language is conceived of as this ceaseless interchange between body, world and symbol.
This foregrounding of the ‘living context’ of language echoes both the Romantic model of fragmentation and necessary incompletion, and Heidegger’s ‘vibration of poetic saying,’ his desire to escape a language bound to ‘presence.’ Truth might well be constant but language changes by necessity, and some forms of truth are only articulable within a framework of holistic irreducibility.
This critique of positivism in fact directs us to the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. What is lost in the model of language that Merleau-Ponty is opposing here is the origin of language within the world. To lose sight of this origin is to lose sight of something foundational, something at the very heart of Merleau-Ponty’s project of
180 primordial retrieval. What is lost, that is, is the ‘primordial silence’ that dwells beneath the ‘chatter of words’:
Our view of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to that origin, so long
as we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we do
not describe the action which breaks this silence. The spoken word is a gesture, and its
meaning, a world. 41
The linguistic holism that emerges in the Phenomenology , which understands language as never completely extractable from our lived experience, has silence at its foundation.
This silence corresponds in several respects to that which we have explored in Heidegger: it articulates a primordial irreducibility which, although not put in these terms in the
Phenomenology , cannot be articulated within a logico-discursive framework.
The locality and materialisation of such a silence, however, differs considerably, and goes to the heart of how these two philosophers approach the question of language. This will be explored in detail below, but for the moment we will note the gestural sense of the word that Merleau-Ponty describes here to be indicative of one essential point of distinction – for Merleau-Ponty, language and silence both emerge within the chiasm of body and world that is located by the gesture.
To discover what exactly this means, we will trace the emergence of silence in the
Phenomenology , before we turn our attention to its development in the later texts.
41 PhP, 214. 181 Silence in The Phenomenology of Perception
The tacit cogito, the presence of oneself to oneself, being no less than
existence, is anterior to any philosophy . . . The consciousness which
conditions language is merely a comprehensive and inarticulate
grasp upon the world . . . . Silent consciousness grasps itself only as
a generalized ‘I think’ in face of confused world ‘to be thought
about.’
The Phenomenology of Perception 42
In the Phenomenology , silence is first located within the Cartesian cogito via a distinction between what are conceived to be its two forms: the tacit and the spoken.
Although Merleau-Ponty will later renounce the distinction, stating that “the prereflective contact of self with self” is “impossible” because the act of thought, as an act of consciousness, necessitates words, and that it is with words that the “constitutive consciousness” is formed, 43 neither the ‘tacit’ nor the ‘ cogito ’ taken individually are renounced.
The above citation therefore demonstrates an important moment in the emergence of silence, which is emphasised when we look at the passage in The Visible and the Invisible in which Merleau-Ponty rejects his earlier conception of the cogito. The paragraph which follows begins: “Yet there is a world of silence, the perceived world, at least, is an order where there are non-language significations—yes, non language significations, but they are not accordingly positive. ”44 Within the interconnection of body, word and world, we therefore see the foregrounding of the perceptual moment as engaging a ‘ world of silence ’ which speaks in ‘ non-language significations .’ 42 ibid., 470. 43 VI, 171. 44 ibid. 182 Despite Merleau-Ponty’s renunciation of his model of the tacit cogito , the movement that it demonstrates retains importance, for even while the way in which this silence is understood shifts, the ‘silence of the self in the face of the self’ being problematised, the primordial element of expression, the reaching back through the self which occurs in this moment of pre-linguistic reflexivity , resonates deeply with both the understanding of communication as it emerges in the Phenomenology and with the later work. The exploration of this primordial element of expression, this continuation of Husserl’s
‘return’ which seeks ‘pre-knowledge’ (in the Phenomenology through an understanding of the body as that which determines/structures this pre-knowing) remains a persistent philosophical goal to the end of Merleau-Ponty’s life, and we can locate it both thematically and stylistically in Eye and Mind and The Visible and the Invisible , as well as other later texts.
Of the cogito itself, thinking it literally is perhaps the best approach, with cogito ergo sum as the celebrated original Cartesian certainty, and the ‘ cogito ’ itself as the cornerstone of Descartes’ newly conceived philosophical foundation: without the ‘I think,’ nothing else becomes possible.
For the ‘I think’ to be silent, it must be a thought without verbal content. As we read above in The Visible and the Invisible , here is the idea’s failing. Yet we are told that it is this silent cogito which constitutes the real goal of philosophical reflection. 45 But why should a form of silence be the goal of philosophy? Merleau-Ponty states that a wealth of meanings is distilled into the word, both subjective and cultural, thus the emphasis of the spoken cogito in Descartes, which is implicit in the “I think . . .” places an emphasis on words that can only “miss their target,” for “between Descartes’ existence and the knowledge of it which he acquires, they interpose the full thickness of cultural
45 PhP, 468. 183 acquisitions.” 46 Rather, what is required is an analysis of “a silence of consciousness embracing the world of speech in which words first receive a form and meaning .” 47 What
Merleau-Ponty is seeking in this silence, the ‘goal of philosophy,’ is the very foundation of meaning, for the meaning of the word in the Phenomenology is not something distant: it is before language, before thought has found its words, before the sign; the il y a of perceptual experience within which meaning to comes forth.
This is why our “view of man will remain superficial” 48 without it: the tacit cogito is the goal of philosophical reflection because it is the very possibility of meaning’s emergence, the state of receptivity that exists within the subject before ideas find their names.
The tacit cogito , beyond its explicitly expressed relationship of ‘self to self,’ implies a speechless originary dimension from which things derive their meaning, 49 and thus expresses more than just the pre-linguistic consciousness’ relation to the linguistic. Pascal
Dupont writes: “The cogito explains nothing other than the original opening upon the world ... The chapter on the cogito shows anew that the field of presence is presence to self and presence to the world inseparably.” 50 For Dupont, the tacit cogito is the principal meaning of the cogito in the Phenomenology. As an expression of the inseparability of the opening between self and the world, this opening is what permits Descartes to muse over the tactile qualities of candle wax, and permits us to enter into language, for it is the very point of reciprocal exchange between consciousness and world at which meaning emerges.
46 ibid. 47 ibid., 469. My emphasis. 48 ibid., 214. 49 Stephen Watson ‘Language, Perception and the Cogito ’ in Merleau-Ponty: Perception, Structure, Language, ed: John Sallis. New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1981. 148. 50 “Le cogito exprime rien d’autre originairement que l’ouverture au monde. [...] Le chapitre sur le cogito montre à nouveau que le champ de présence est présence à soi et présence au monde inséparablement.” Pascal Dupont ‘Du Cogito Tacite au Cogito Vertical’ in Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol 2, From Nature to Ontology. Paris, Vrin, 2000. 281, 283. 184 This is not to defend the tacit cogito in itself, but to emphasise that even in the
Phenomenology silence might be read to contain this element of primordiality that extends beyond subjectivity: if meaning is in the world within this silent joining, and the symbol to express that meaning is within the culturally indoctrinated subject as a
‘language signification,’ something profound occurs between the two which allows that meaning to come to light, allows its movement from silence to speech. The silence of the tacit cogito is a silence of consciousness; yet in this way it might also be conceived of as the site of the world’s transformation into speech, a kind of chiasm of ‘world-meaning’ and language.
If we look past the paradox of the cogito that is unable to engage in symbol, we see that this site of meaning’s transformation and the way of that transformation is the very question itself: the simultaneous union and separation of subjectivity with world, and the transformation of that world into language.
The ‘return to the things themselves,’ called for by Husserl, might then be read as a reaching for pre-linguistic silence, Merleau-Ponty writing in the Preface of the
Phenomenology that “To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign language.” 51 If this tacit cogito permits the subject’s opening upon meaning, then clearly it allows the very possibility of philosophy as well, and any philosophical project which seeks only the spoken cogito will only find meaning after it has been sedimented into language via linguistic history.
So if we put ourselves in the place of Descartes, we discover ourselves there in our shack, the remnant of the evening’s meal still present in faint, imprecise odours, a slight draft coming through a crack in the wall’s dry timber boarding, which contrasts the
51 PhP, ix-x. 185 warmth of the iron stove, the flickering brightness of the candle flame, the reflection of which burns crimson in the remnants of a glass of wine... in short, all those perceptual offerings that make up our presence there, at that instant. Yet even in naming them such as we have done here, they have been stripped of a certain originary quality – they have become words: individualistic, heavy with cultural and historical meaning, both too large and too small to name the phenomenon itself.
My original communication with my environment was one of silence, of a perceptual membrane open upon the world and of that world communicating certain presences via the penetration of that membrane in some kind of ‘non-language significations’: the smells and colours and physical sensations which tell me I exist, and the phenomenological nature of that existence.
Descartes’ failure, such as we read it in the Phenomenology , is that the movement between pre-linguistic awareness, presence, and the translation of this presence into words, is lost, and that this movement is the question itself. Within the ‘I think’ uttered, within the cogito itself, the ‘fall’ is instantaneous: we are transported from phenomena into mind, with the nature of our transportation being lost.
In the Phenomenology’s chapter, ‘The Thing and the Natural World’ we read: “The fact is that if we want to describe it, we must say that my experience breaks forth into things and transcends itself in them, because it always comes into being within the framework of a certain setting in relation to the world which is the definition of my body.” 52 The body both expresses a form of silence – its own non-language significations
– and is an opening onto the world, as that which perceives the silent meaning that arises in the perceptual chiasm of world and subject.
52 PhP, 353. 186 Richard Shusterman writes that the tacit cogito should be understood as the body.53 I would argue, however, that it is more than this. Certainly in the Phenomenology Merleau-
Ponty writes of the body as being a “nexus of living meanings,”54 and the locating of the word’s origin within bodily gesture suggests such a reading. Yet as the presence of
‘consciousness to itself,’ a pre-reflexive ‘I think,’ it also signposts a model of silence that extends from the body to the world. The body is silence, in the sense that the body is the site of phenomenological uptake before its transformation into speech, and speech at the stage of gesture. But this requires the body to be conceived of as a pre-reflexive understanding that cannot be fully reconstructed by thought.55
However, we need to keep these two elements of bodily silence in mind. Our body is also, for Merleau-Ponty, an ‘opening onto things.’ This means that the body, as a ‘nexus of living meanings,’ is only such a nexus via its contact with world – within the spatial, temporal synthesis of the phenomenal field. 56 The tacit cogito is the body, but it is the body understood as chiasm , as an opening onto things as a site of meaningful exchange .
Language emerges from this pre-linguistic nexus as the movement we have described above: its mystery is that it remains bound in some way to its origins within silence, within the world, yet is also sedimented via its historical usage into syntactic structures.
Philosophy must address this silence if it seeks to be more than ‘symptomatic,’ more than a ‘superficial’ reflection of such structures—more, that is, than a representation of the world according to pre-established structures of language and philosophy .
53 Richard Shusterman, ‘The Silent Limping Body of Philosophy’ in The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty , ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. N. Hansen. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. 151. 54 PhP, 175. 55 Douglas Low Merleau-Ponty’s Last Vision: A Proposal for the Completion of the Visible and the Invisible . Evanston, Northwestern University, 2000. 35-6. 56 PhP, 175. 187 The meaning of the body/world conjunction is this perceptual contact, which is a synthesis, and we cannot remove the body from its context and maintain a conception of it as a site of meaning – not, at least, in the sense we are discussing here, the ‘living meaning’ that Merleau-Ponty is seeking for it. The body ‘upon the slab,’ for instance, might be reduced to certain physiological principles, but this is not the meaning that
Merleau-Ponty seeks, and it is certainly not the meaning of the body as it is for the subject. We are reminded again of Goethe’s counter-thrust to Enlightenment’s scientism, that “Nature will reveal nothing under torture.” 57
The gesture demonstrates this act of exchange: it gestures to a silence that is operative within the world, which might be ‘turned into speech’ at the site of the body: “beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence.” 58 But even locating silence within the body in this way, within gesture, the body itself is not the originary realm of silence, although we locate a perceptual silence within it. Rather it is in the joining of body and world that silence becomes meaning. We might, then, consider the body as a kind of conduit, the site at which the silence of the world is transformed into expression. We ‘hear’ this silence, then, as the underlying possibility of expression that exists behind every encounter with the world. In this context, we hear the silent meaning of the gesture as its spatial/temporal localisation or encirclement of phenomena. It is the primordial silence upon which expression is founded, but that silence is not the gesture itself, or even its meaning, but rather the precise point of that meaning’s emergence as this synthesis of body and world: the chiasm that is the origin and foundation of meaning.
Silence is the expressive negative of a world spilling forth its meaning, before meaning finds its way into utterance.
57 J.W. von Goethe in Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred. Charlottesville and London, University of Virginia Press, 2004. 19. 58 PhP, 214. 188 Volumes of Silence: ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,’
The Visible and the Invisible, & Beyond
The Visible and the Invisible discovers that the silence of
consciousness – or better, the world of silence – is not the confusion
of consciousness, but the interior logos – èndiathetos 59 – to vertical
Being.
Pascal Dupont 60
.
We have seen then the way in which silence is localised within the body/world chiasm in the Phenomenology. This conception remains in the later texts, but is extended via a strengthening of the relationship between silence and established linguistic structures. It is in the essay ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ that we see this occur most visibly.
This essay takes its departure from the Saussurean diacritical theory of the sign – that the sign’s meaning is not found in correspondence of signifier with signified, but rather with its divergence with other signs – and presents us with a silence characterised by a muteness of the sign itself. Such a sign draws meaning from a silent divergence. With meaning arriving only at the “edge of signs,” there is the “immanence of the whole in the parts,” a phenomenon, we are told, which “is found throughout the history of culture.” 61
Thus for Merleau-Ponty, Saussure does not prefigure a groundlessness in language, but
59 The logos endiathetos is opposed to the logos prophorikos. This was probably formulated by the stoics as a distinction between ‘internal logos’ and ‘uttered logos.’ We reason within ourselves with the former, but speak with the latter. See: Adam Kamesar, ‘The Logos Edniathetos and the Logos Prophorikos in Allegorical Interpretation: Philo and the D-Scholia to the Iliad.’ Greek, Roman and Bysantine Studies. 44, 2004. 163. 60 “Le Visible et l’invisible découvre que le silence de la conscience – ou mieux, le monde du silence – n’est pas la confusion de la conscience, mais le logos intérieur – èndiathetos – à l’Être vertical .” Pascal Dupont, ‘Du Cogito Tacite au Cogito Vertical’ in Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol 2, From Nature to Ontology. Paris, Vrin, 2000. 286. 61 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’ in Signs , trans. Richard C. Mcleary. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. 41. Henceforth cited as ILVS. 189 rather an “opaqueness.” This understanding of diacritical meaning then represents an opening of the sign both upon a world that is in itself meaningful, and upon other signs.
Nowhere does it leave space for pure meaning, and thus the relationship between word, world and meaning is in a constant state of flux and redress. 62 It is this indirection of language, its illusiveness and incompletion, that for Merleau-Ponty illustrates for us its place in silence, or rather, indicates the place of silence within language.
It is this indirection of language that allows us to conceive of the body/world chiasm as a viable site of meaning. The opaqueness of language is, in this sense, its salvation. Henri
Maldiney writes:
Between that which language permits to be said and that which is to be said, there is no
adequation. It is precisely this gap which makes us speak. The property of language which
permits speech is its impropriety. Without it we would be no more than the transcribers of
programmed information, the terminals of computers.63
Without the écart, language would be reduced to ‘data,’ with no place for living expression. This gap, which Merleau-Ponty locates in Saussure, is that which allows language to speak, which is to say, it is that which allows us to create new meaning.
Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure differs sharply from the Structuralist and Post-
Structuralist theorists who take up his work. Although the importance that Derrida, for instance, places upon language in determining how the subject conceives reality does find a degree of echo in Merleau-Ponty, the primary position Derrida gives the signifier does 62 ILVS, 42. 63 “Entre ce que la langue permet de dire et ce qui est à dire, il n’y a pas adéquation. C’est précisément cet écart qui nous fait parlant. La propriété de la langue qui permet la parole c’est son impropriété. Sans elle nous ne serions que des transcripteurs d’informations programmées, des terminaux d’ordinateurs.” Henri Maldiney, L’art, l’éclair de l’Être. Chambéry, Éditions Comp’Act, 2003. 105-6. 190 not. 64 For Merleau-Ponty, the world is always first, before language, before thought, before self: it is the seed that makes any germination of subject or word possible. For
Merleau-Ponty, it is precisely the ability of the text to transport us beyond its borders that gives it its power. If the world is there before language, then although there is an aspect of existence that is linguistically mediated, we remain in contact with that which is not .
The question is therefore one of the relationship between the sign and its origin, and how (and if ) we might come to speak of that which is prior to this linguistic mediation.
For Merleau-Ponty, truth can only be found within the articulation of self and world. It is within our corporeal meeting with the world that there exists the undeniable fact of our presence as living creatures linked with that world. “Before our undivided existence,” he writes, “the world is true; it exists. The unity, the articulations of both are intermingled.
We experience it in a truth which shows through and envelops us rather than being held and circumscribed by our mind.” 65 This truth cannot be rigorously defined, yet it remains there implicit within language, inasmuch as language originates in the world.
This is the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, and is the crux of his notion of silence: truth exists and grounds us to our world, it is the very chiasma of the joining, yet it contains this implicit irreducible: it is a truth that surrounds us and holds us to the world, a truth of our very embodied binding to things, yet it is not a truth of correspondence. Language is part of this relationship. It unites us with others and with things, and as a facet of this real world from which we emerge cannot be cut off from that world in the kind of absolute sense. The opaqueness of language corresponds to that of experience: both contain an irreducibility, a necessary silence. Truth dwells in language 64 For a discussion of the Merleau-Ponty’s thought in relation to Derrida’s, see: M.C. Dillon, Écart & Différence. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing. Atlantic Highlands, Humanities Press, 1997. 65 UP, 6. 191 not through a correspondence of word and thing, but with the same kind of completion with which the body dwells within the world; taken up in its flesh as a part of the whole.
It is this linguistic ‘holism,’ this presence of all possible meanings within each sign, which allows Merleau-Ponty his distinctive reading of Saussure, and allows him to lead us, yet again, into the primordial, into the substrate of unnamed meaning upon which our quotidian communications of linguistic meaning are constructed.
Interestingly, a form of this analysis is found already in The Structure of Behaviour , which is written before his encounter with Saussure, Merleau-Ponty writing that the “true sign represents the signified, not according to an empirical association, but inasmuch as its relation to other signs is the same as the relation of the object signified by it to other objects.” 66 Although this falls short of announcing a semiotic diacritics, it does state an open field of signification via relation and divergence. It is an interesting early link between linguistic structure and world structure, containing a necessity of holistic connectivity.
In the Phenomenology , speech emerges from silence, but in part through his readings of Saussure, Merleau-Ponty later locates that silence not only within the perceptual relationship, but within the workings of language and its relationship with perception.
Speech rests upon a “background of silence which does not cease to surround it and without which it would say nothing.” Thus in order to articulate the primordial, “we must uncover the threads of silence that speech is mixed together with.” 67
Here too, therefore, we see Merleau-Ponty reaching towards silence in the same movement as he reaches for a primordial linguistic foundation: silence as the intersection of perceptual consciousness and world. Although it is not explicitly named as such, but is offered alternative meanings, the origin of this silence remains consistent. The silence of 66 SB, 121-2. 67 ILVS, 46. 192 speech and the silence of the world are not one and the same, however: rather, as the idea of ‘background’ suggests to us, the silence of speech originates in the silence of the world.
We find a confirmation of this when we look at the greater movement and content of this essay. That is, in this long work, which is entitled ‘Indirect language and the Voices of Silence,’ for over 40 pages Merleau-Ponty is writing about painting . Consider for a moment the work’s title in the context of this transformation of content: it begins with
Saussure and the indirection of language itself, then moves onto the ‘incompletion’ of painterly expression, in a discussion that includes, amongst others, Cézanne, Klee and
Baudelaire. Throughout are constant references to Malraux’s great work on the history of art, The Voices of Silence, from which the second part of Merleau-Ponty’s essay draws its title.
The result is the creation of a parallel between expression as word and expression as image that focuses our attention on the origin of all forms of expression and thus to meaning itself: that is, expression as the expression of world and meaning as the perceptual contact between world and subject . The ‘voices of silence’ are the voices of things: each a “fragment of the world” 68 that communicates itself to us. Be it painting, poetry, novel, philosophy or sculpture, the movement for the artist or writer or sculptor is that same movement that Merleau-Ponty sought to address in his exploration of the tacit cogito : the birth of meaning and its movement from world to the conscious self.
What Merleau-Ponty is looking for within the ‘voices of silence’ is meaning before it finds its way into culture, before it is sedimented into word. In a working note from
September 1959, Merleau-Ponty extends the implications of his reading of Saussure, writing:
68 ibid. 193 The Saussurean analysis of the relations between signifiers and the relation from signifier to
signified and between the significations (as differences between significations) confirms
and rediscovers the idea of perception as a divergence (écart ) by relation to a level , that is,
the idea of the primordial Being, of the Convention of conventions, of the speech before
speech. 69
Although a typically dense and somewhat enigmatic note, the direction it indicates is clear: the “opaqueness” of communication that is implied in Saussure, this linguistic opening upon the world, confirms a similarly opaque space within perception. What is termed ‘primordial Being,’ the ‘speech before speech,’ is none other than a kind of silence: the perceptual silence that is the experience of the subject in the face of the silent meaning of the world, a perceptual experience that grants the subject access to primordial
Being.
This connection between silence, sign and primordial meaning is deepened in The
Visible and the Invisible. Discussion of silence as a foundation of meaning is scattered through the working notes and the body of the text, suggesting that the concept was, although fundamental, still undergoing a process of clarification – a possibility borne out by schemata found with Merleau-Ponty’s papers after his death. 70 While emphasising this ontological primordiality of silence, we must keep in mind that it remains a silence oriented by language; that is: “[...] language realizes, by breaking the silence, what the silence wished and did not obtain. Silence continues to envelop language; the silence of 69 VI, 201. 70 One schema, from November 1960, reads: I. The visible and nature. 1. Philosophical interrogation. 2. The visible. 3. The world of silence. 4. The visible and ontology (Wild Being). II. The world and the invisible. See VI, p. xxxvi . Conflicting schemata were found. 194 the absolute language, of the thinking language.” 71 In a characteristic metaphor, silence is personified, given a will of its own and a desire towards the communication of its
‘secret.’
And what is the “absolute language,” the “thinking language”? Speech, we are told, enters the child “as silence (i.e. as a thing simply perceived).” 72 The absolute language here is a language of things, a language outside reduction because it founds reduction: the
“fecund negative” 73 of meaning to come. We see, therefore, that by bringing together a primordial silence with that of sign, the diacritical meaning creation of the signifier comes to be conceived as that element that allows its opening upon the immanent boundless possibility of the signified as world : a conception that would not be possible within any relationship of absolute correspondence. It is the echo of corresponding negativities that permits Merleau-Ponty to anchor silence within semiotic analysis.
This relationship between silence and meaning becomes increasingly important in the emergent ontology of Merleau-Ponty’s later work. It is within this perceptual opening upon silence as simultaneously an opening upon meaning and language that we experience ‘primordial Being,’ that is, ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ Being. Merleau-Ponty writes:
“The brute or wild being ( = the perceived world) . . . there is a world of silence, the perceived world.”74 Wild Being is to be understood as that which is not cultivated by man yet still possesses meaning. Silence is then seen as a communication of the subject’s point of opening upon the world, that which is prior to language and reflection.
Perception is already meaningful, but its meaning is a silent one – a silence of the world as this joining of sensory experience with a world-meaning that ‘is what it is,’ come to be within the chiasm of world and body. This chiasm, with its inherent opacity of bodily 71 ibid., 176. 72 ibid., 263. 73 ibid. 74 ibid., 170-1. 195 relations, language and world as a dynamic of silent exchange, comes to be known as
‘flesh.’
The Flesh
Our flesh and the flesh of the world, joined in a living relationship of sensory and physical exchange, serves as the basis for an ontology. It is from Sartre that he appropriates this concept: however whereas Sartre conceives of the flesh as a clogging of subjectivity within the confines of the organic body, for Merleau-Ponty this union of body and subjectivity occurs as the very essence of unity itself.
In Sartre the body is problematically conceived as existing either in the form of knowing/perceiving or existing in the form of the known/perceived (but not as both simultaneously): the body of the other is only conceived as an object. The relationship between bodies is purely an external one – for one subject, the body of the other exists in the world only as one object among other objects. In fact, Sartre goes as far as to say that the other exists for one subject first, and that it is only subsequently that his body is apprehended. 75
This dualism is ultimately dismissed outright by Merleau-Ponty, with the flesh at the centre of his dismissal: “We have to reject the age-old assumptions that put the body in the world and the seer in the body, or, conversely, the world and the body in the seer as in a box. Where are we to put the limit between the body and the world, since the world is flesh?” 76
75 M. C. Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology . Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988. 141. 76 VI, 138. 196 Early in The Phenomenology of Perception , Merleau-Ponty offers a description of one hand touching the other: this “is not a matter of two sensations felt together as one perceives two objects placed side by side, but of an ambiguous set-up in which both hands can alternate the roles of ‘touching’ and ‘being touched.’” In the process of touching itself while being touched, the body initiates “a kind of reflection.” 77 This reflectivity gains increasing importance as Merleau-Ponty’s work develops, and becomes vital to his breakdown of a bodily subject/object dichotomy. But just as this exploration by Merleau-Ponty finds no radical separation, likewise there is no absolute coincidence.
With the breakdown of the subject and object distinction, traditional notions of identity and difference are also challenged, which produces a somewhat ambiguous identity within difference. Self and world are not one, but neither are they completely separate; they comprise instead a phenomenological field, and it is the reversibility of this field that grounds the flesh.
It is an insight grounded both in 20 th Century science, the history of Western philosophy, and the concrete analysis of phenomenological experience. This flux of body and world goes beyond the cogito , beyond boundaries of skin, and comes to signify the principle that underlies the meeting and interdependence of all things – an apparent convergence of immanence and transcendence within the active, living, breathing body.
Merleau-Ponty wishes to describe “a pre-knowing; a pre-meaning, a silent knowing” 78 at the level of the human body, and the flesh is the name to this silent knowledge.
The flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the
old term “element,” in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in
the sense of a general thing , midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a
77 PhP, 106-7. 78 VI, 178. 197 sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.
The flesh is in this sense an “element” of Being. 79
This linguistic retrieval recalls Heideggerian etymology: the attempt to recover an ancient thought structure through the revival of an ancient word. Yet, indicative of the diversity of his background, Merleau-Ponty’s word is a contemporary one, which points to the most basic substances of matter. The attempt, then, is of a melding of worlds – the challenging of a world view defined by scientific atomisation with one based within a phenomenological opening.
This principle allows a coalescence of flesh as body and flesh as world, and it is within this commingling that the flesh as an engagement with pre-meaning, with primordial
Being, arises. As a primordial perceptual encounter, the flesh represents the ‘incarnate principle’ that is present in this mind/body engagement with the world. Thus the flesh is not the facts of the subject’s body or of world, but is rather the principle by which
“fragmentary facts dispose themselves about “something”,”80 a “flesh of things that speaks to us of our own flesh.” 81 Most important for the present discussion, the flesh is conceived of as a locus of truth prior to any formulation into a thetic position .
It should be clear that this understanding of Being should not be reduced to a kind of
‘perceptual positivism.’ Rather, via the flesh, Merleau-Ponty wishes to show Being as in some way implicit in perceptual experience, as written in that experience ‘in filigree,’ and thus that perception brings us to an engagement with Being. 82 Within the chiasm of consciousness and world, what emerges is more than a meaning structure that is 79 ibid., 139. 80 ibid., 140. 81 ibid., 193. 82 Emmanuel de Saint Aubert, ‘From Brute Being to Man : A Contextualization of Two Unpublished Merleau-Ponty Notes’ trans. Len Lawlor, Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol. 7, Merleau-Ponty: Life and Individuation . Paris, Vrin, 2005. 32. 198 syphoned via the body from world into language, as we read in the Phenomenology : rather, here within the brute perceptual experience is the truth of Being itself. Our presence as linguistic creatures living within the world, a world that correspondingly lives in us, offers as itself an engagement with pre-linguistic experience.
This contact with a pre-linguistic primordiality, what we have been calling silence, is given an ontological inflection in its description as ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ Being. Although they share this primordiality, however, ‘wild Being’ names more than the silent chiasm of self and world.
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘wild Being’ finds its origin in Husserl’s attempt to combat the forgetting of the natural lifeworld. 83 Husserl’s analysis was intended to reintegrate the lifeworld into philosophy, not only as a point of orientation, a remembering of origins, but as a “basis and horizon of meaning and truth.” 84 The lineage of ‘wild Being’ is more complex than this, however, encompassing ‘Being’ in the sense that it is isolated in
Heidegger, but also Being as that which shares this pre-linguistic realm of silence, prior to thought and word .
In fact, this pre-reflexive realm has a Romantic origin in Schelling. In On the Essence of Human Freedom , Schelling theorises the presence of the ideal within the real as an
“irreducible remainder which cannot be dissolved into reason by the greatest exertion but always remains in the depths.” 85 This remainder comes to be called the ‘barbarian remnant’ or ‘barbarian principle’ in Merleau-Ponty, and is at times used interchangeably and at times appositively, with Être sauvage : ‘vertical,’ ‘wild’ or ‘brute’ Being. 86
83 Antje Kupust, ‘The So-Called “Barbarian Basis of Nature” and its Secret Logos’ in Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol 2, From Nature to Ontology. Paris, Vrin, 2000. 167. 84 ibid. 85 F.W.Schelling, Of Human Freedom, trans. James Gatman. Chicago, Open Court Publishing Company, 1936. In Kapust, 2000. 168. 86 Vallier, 2000. 93. 199 Being here is the Being of a body located in a world that “folds back” upon that body, with meaning emerging within that fold . Being is thus written ‘in filigree’ within our structures of meaning. Schelling’s ‘barbarian principle’ is located within this fold as that
‘invisible’ and ‘indivisible’ remnant of perception. However, meaning, in so emerging, carries this implicit remainder within itself, this barbaric principle which escapes reduction. This means that language contains within it its pre-linguistic origins as the layers of Being, and further, that in continuing to hold such origins, that it contains an implicit negativity as part of its greater structure, as that remnant of chiasm of body- world-expression that language continues to hold.
We can see, when we consider this in relation to Merleau-Ponty’s exploration of
Saussure, how the idea of corresponding opacities then becomes a central point of crossover between the world of signs, and the pre-linguistic point of meaning’s emergence that is essentially un-representable , yet retains a presence within linguistic structures .
The brute perceptual location of ‘wild’ Being is an attempt by Merleau-Ponty to articulate a ground of truth before it is formulated into thought or language, and his reading of Saussure allows that ground to be transferred into language.
Silence is thus conceived of as the silence of the world to perceptual consciousness (as meaning to come) and, subsequently, as the presence of this silence within language – the primordial silence beneath ‘the chatter of words.’ That it is ‘beneath’ the ‘chatter of words’ indicates the way that Merleau-Ponty sees these pre-linguistic structures as still being present within language. The silence that arises within the subject’s experience of the world represents a kind of virgin meaning, and furthermore, signals this orientation towards such meaning as the kind of original foundation that we find in Husserl.
200 That we are oriented to silence and meaning simultaneously has important implications for both language and ontology. This simultaneous possibility and absence of communication makes a promise that language is too poor for the realisation of Being, but at the same time offers the possibility that language might, in some way, exceed the explicit front of its own significations – bring out the silent in the same breath as the
‘audible’ – and thereby approach Being in its primordiality. Language, if it is to articulate
Being, must contain an essential negativity.
Something of a paradox emerges here between language – and perception – as in some respects historically and culturally determined, and this opening upon Être sauvage . At the same time as we recognise the cultural element within the formation of language, however, we follow Merleau-Ponty in stating that the perceived world as a brute thing is everywhere, that it enfolds us within its flesh at the same time as we enfold it within perception, that this ‘brute thing’ exists within us as well as within the world, and that this is true of language as well, which is both of the world and of culture, and contains this barbarian remnant that escapes reduction even as a cultural formation.
Expression thus contains the threat of its redundancy, in that it might point only to a meaning that is cultural and historical and thus refer ‘only to itself,’ and the promise that it might reach beyond its historical structures, that it might express our perceptual encounter with the world as well, and so doing express ‘brute’ Being, which is present in the undeniableness of the world as an absolute that we meet within experience, and is there equally within the subject and language.
The precise relationship between this silence as primordiality and silence as a silence of linguistic meaning is the central question of The Visible and the Invisible , and might be reframed as: what is this union of body, meaning and world? This question further reframes the ‘possibility’ of philosophy that arrives with Kant and which we have seen it
201 taken up and transformed by Heidegger. A recently published working note reads as follows:
entrances, but there are entrances – For my part, the philosophy of brute (or perceptive)
being takes us out of the Cartesian cogito , of Sartrean intersubjectivity, makes us see that
language has us [nous a ], that there is a mystery of history, reveals to us institutions
[institutions] beneath the flux of Erlebnisse and the fulgurations of the decision, – but for it,
the nexus [ foyer ] remains the perceptive field, insofar as it contains everything: nature and
history.
Simply, instead of saying: to be perceived and perception, I should rather say: brute or wild
being and “foundation” (Stiftung) 87
87 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Unpublished Working Notes’ in Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol. 7, Merleau-Ponty: Life and Individuation . Paris, Vrin, 2005. 42. 202 6
Merleau-Ponty
and the Silence of Nature
What resists phenomenology within us—natural being, the “barbarous”
source Schelling spoke of—cannot remain outside phenomenology and
should have its place within it. The philosopher must bear his shadow
‘The Philosopher and his Shadow’ 1
Descartes’ anchor, the positive object with which he is able to dispel radical doubt –
God – is for Kant an unthinkable, an “abyss of human reason,” the Urgrund (‘primal ground’) or unconditioned, the thinking of which can never produce positive results. Yet this problem of philosophical and linguistic grounding that emerged with the first
Critique had a profound effect on Schelling, and proved to be the question to which he would devote much of his life. For Schelling, it was not the end of philosophy, but in a sense a new beginning, inasmuch as it was the naming of a problem.
More precisely, it was the naming of the problem, and moreover, was understood as a living problem: that is, any ground that might be conceived must be a ‘living ground’ – not as an abstract dialectical construct – but rather as “the fundamental stuff of all life and every existent ... a barbaric principle ... without this principle that withstands thought, the world would already be dissolved into nothing.” 2 A living ground is a
1 PS, 178. 2 F.W.J. Schelling, The Ages of the World in Vallier, 2000. 90. 203 philosophical ground located with the irreducible yet real manifestations of life, concrete elements of our engagement with the world.
We have just examined the complex web of relationships that might be opened up between this barbaric principle, language, world and the body. The pre-linguistic “Être sauvage ,” we are told by Merleau-Ponty, the “barbarous source” that precedes all reduction, must have its place within phenomenology.3 In the opening section of this chapter we will examine the way in which this problem is framed in terms of a ‘living ground’ in Merleau-Ponty’s study of nature. Nature, as it emerges within the discussion in the lectures, is not an abstract, essentially distant, concept. Rather, besides the exploration of different philosophical models of nature (such as those of Schelling or
Bergson), nature is articulated through the analysis of a variety of organisms, from sea urchins and protazoa to butterflies. 4 It contains a ‘living ground,’ therefore, in a very real sense.
Merleau-Ponty’s search for ground, his articulation of pre-linguistic origin, is therefore taken back to living, acting, organisms, organisms engaged in meaningful relationships with their environment. This is the ultimate meaning of ‘living ground’ as it exists for
Merleau-Ponty. Nature is seen to articulate a living structure of meaning with which we are in constant contact. In the second section of this chapter, the interplay of meaning and life will take us into an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s work as a ‘philosophy of life.’
Within these two intertwined themes of nature and life will be a concretion of the expansive and holistic theory of meaning that began to emerge in the previous chapter.
These themes, and the examination of language and silence, will coalesce in the third and final section in an analysis of the rich and poetic form of Merleau-Ponty’s expression
3 For the emphasis of this link between Merleau-Ponty and Schelling, I am indebted to: Vallier 2000. 83- 103. 4 N, 185, 221. 204 and how it might be understood as a ‘living language’ which, in engaging meaning’s
‘positive’ and ‘negative’ aspects, can be seen to articulate his model ‘silence.’
Nature & Être Sauvage
Merleau-Ponty describes the necessity of incorporating Schelling’s originating principle as phenomenology’s final task,5 stating this ‘barbarous’ element as “non- phenomenology” because it resists phenomenological reduction. This ‘brute’ Being points to a conception of nature as prior to our reflective experience and indicates one side of what in Husserl is a bifurcation of philosophy: that reflection leads us, on the one hand, into nature as this pre-given, “the sphere of the Urpräsentierbare ,” and on the other hand into the sphere of “persons and minds.” 6 The problem, expressed in these terms, is the “mediation of the world of nature and the world of persons,” 7 and for
Merleau-Ponty, the consideration of “wild” carries with it a concrete movement towards the consideration of nature as this pre-given, the Urpräsentierbare we find in Husserl.
Although Merleau-Ponty recognises the cultural and linguistic ‘baggage’ that results from the projection of meaning onto perception, he sees in nature the presence of a primordially given which proceeds this projection. This demonstrates, then, a pre- linguistic a contact between the subject and his/her lifeworld that might reflect Being in this primordial state.
5 PS, 178. 6 ibid. 7 ibid. 205 The possibility of articulating a pre-linguistic point of contact with the world that also carries the corporeal presence of nature offers great promise, and we can see how it engages the core of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. This focus on the relationship between nature and consciousness is a recurrent theme and what we see in this later movement towards its alignment with Être sauvage is a refining of concepts that emerged within his earliest work. If we return to the first line of his first published text, The Structure of
Behaviour , Merleau-Ponty writes: “Our goal is to understand the relations of consciousness and nature: organic, psychological or even social. By nature we understand here a multiplicity of events external to each other and bound together by relations of causality.” 8 Already, then, in this early text, we discover the chiasm of organic and conceptual.
This definition of nature is one of causal relationship: although it lacks the definitiveness of the ‘autoproduction’ we meet in the later lecture series (see below), it is a relation of necessity. The task is therefore to understand this natural imperative, an imperative which underlies consciousness and binds it to the world, to things, to other subjectivities. It is worth adding at this juncture that the focus on ‘behaviour’ that the title of this text indicates might be seen to offer an early attack on the scientific dualisms of organism and consciousness, mental and physiological. This breakdown points to the commencement of a primordial thinking which defines Merleau-Ponty’s work.
Merleau-Ponty attempts to come, he says, ‘from below,’ and this analysis contradicts an atomistic interpretation which sees behaviour as “reduced to the sum of reflexes and conditioned reflexes between which no intrinsic connection is permitted” 9 – an interpretation which, in Merleau-Ponty’s view, fails both at the level of psychology and reflex. The exploration of behaviour, then, reframes the link between consciousness and nature by bridging the gap between the psychological and the physical. 8 SB, 3. 9 ibid, 4-5. 206
In Merleau-Ponty’s introduction to the course on nature, in which he discusses the origin of the word ‘nature’ itself, he extracts a specific meaning from its Latin origin in the course of a search for its primordial sense: “There is nature wherever there is a life which has meaning, but where, however, there is not thought ... nature is what has a meaning, without this meaning being posited by thought. It is the autoproduction of meaning.” 10 Nature is therefore seen as not only a living ground, as a ground which exists for itself and resists phenomenological reduction, but as that which produces meaning out of itself. We see then how nature can be conceived of as primordial ground, and this autoproduction of meaning suggests a working definition of nature as that which produces itself in a continual act of creation: an inescapable principle of creative renewal such that “it would impose itself upon God himself as an independent condition of his operation.” 11
Within this act of self-creation, the importance of nature for the philosophical project is that it continually produces and nurtures us as subjects: consciousness begins in nature and remains inextricably tied to it. 12
Even within the cultural transformation that is an inextricable element of subjectivity and language, there remains then articulation with originary production. The subject is continually aligned with that which is prior to subjectivity.
The ‘silence’ represented by nature might thus be conceived of a silence that is continually renewed in ourselves via our perceptual contact with the world. Although the
‘historical baggage’ of perception is not something that might be dismissed, in our
10 N, 3. 11 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952-1960’ in In Praise of Philosophy and Other Essays trans. John Wild. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1988. 134. 12 Low, 38. 207 contact with the world there remains this primordial indivisible, something that is prior to this historical understanding and meaning making .
This marks a significant departure from Heidegger. Although subjectivity may be awash with cultural and historic meanings, the pure objectivity of the world, conceived of here as nature, as a ‘living ground’ of our being, is always intersecting with our present, informing our concepts and meanings, penetrating us. It is there as an underlying structure of our engagement with the world, and is as such present within utterance, just as cultural structures too are present.
In a working note written shortly before his death, Merleau-Ponty writes:
“Nature is the first day” . . . It is a question of finding in the present, the flesh of the world
(and not in the past) as “ever new” and “always the same” . . . The sensible, Nature,
transcend the past present distinction, realize from within a passage from one into the
other Existential eternity. The indestructible, the barbaric Principle 13
Nature is thus to be understood as that principle which lies outside time and thought, obviously more than a combination of physical conditions – fauna, flora etc, such as it is commonly conceived – but as this underlying principle and possibility of their production, and ours, and of the production of meaning also. In fact, as that which produces itself, and produces meaning out of itself . At the same time, these physical components structure, and are structured by, this underlying principle.
The examination of nature, as this point of self-created origin, is the examination of a certain form of Being – what comes to be understood, within this idea of self-creation, as
13 VI, 267. 208 the “non-instituted.” 14 This is that element of Being as the ‘ever new, ever the same’ that transcends its historical context. As nature, this generative principle is not only in the world as that which is external to subjectivity: there exists the seed of this ‘non- instituted’ Being within the subject, for we remain in constant contact with the “non- instituted” as that which is prior to all our cultural structures.
This is not to deny that there are cultural aspects to such an engagement, but to suggest that there is something more occurring here also: a contact with that which is before culture, language and thought, but which nonetheless is a part of them, the inextricable intertwining of meaning structures with that which is outside or beyond them. In the previous chapter we saw this in the presence of the pre-linguistic within symbolic structures. We are, then, broadening this to an understanding of that which is beyond culture as an integral aspect of that culture.
We understand, then, why for Merleau-Ponty, the way into an understanding of nature here is also the pathway of phenomenology. We do not come to understand nature by abstract analysis, but rather – and here we follow the words of Schelling – by living and experiencing it and ourselves: the “Nature outside of us is revealed by the nature that we are,”15 and presumably vice versa. We learn and relearn this primordial contact with nature, and thus with ‘brute Being,’ via our continued perceptual engagement with the world. We can see how, when combined with the theory of the flesh, this can be orienting and grounding: that our corporeal body structure is an opening upon the physicality of nature, that as an embodied consciousness, we are simultaneously an opening upon its autoproductive structures of meaning.
14 “comprise comme ce qui n’est pas instituté.” Renaud Barbaras, ‘Merleau-Ponty et la nature,’ in Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol 2, From Nature to Ontology. Paris, Vrin, 2000. 51. 15 Vallier, 2000. 92. 209 We are “caught up in the tissue of things,” 16 a tissue of communicative interplay that contains structures of truth. The truth that we are oriented to via the perceptual reciprocity of the flesh is this truth of the world that precedes phenomenological reduction because it is of this primordial relation. Merleau-Ponty writes:
My body model of the things and the things model of my body: the body bound to the
world through all its parts, up against it → all this means: the world, the flesh not as fact or
sum of facts, but as the locus of an inscription of truth; the false crossed out, not
nullified. 17
This passage, inserted into the text of The Visible and the Invisible , speaks to us of a carnal meaning irreducible to ‘fact,’ a meaning of the body and of the world, which dwells in both equally. This locus of truth is the ‘pre-objective’ that Merleau-Ponty seeks in nature, an ontology grounded in this idea of nature as productive principle and located in the body. In ‘living’ nature in this way, in our state of ‘being’ nature, we are placed in a circuit with an ontological truth that exists beyond reduction, but which is understood, via this principle of the flesh, through embodied being.
Although Schelling does not capitalise on the corporeal element of this relationship, he does say that the ‘I’ of idealism and erste Natur (his conception of nature in the
Naturphilosophie ) “have a common ground in preobjective Being.” 18 At the same time as this illustrates a proximity between Merleau-Ponty’s and Schelling, it reminds us that the
‘I’ of idealism is an ‘I’ of intellectual reflection: thus it is in taking Schelling, in a sense, back into the body, that Merleau-Ponty sees the concretion of nature as ground.
16 VI, 135. 17 ibid., 131. 18 Schelling cited in Vallier, 2000. 93. 210 If ‘wild’ Being is accessed via our perceptual contact with things, if things are, in this way, ‘a model of my body,’ we begin to realise a groundedness of Merleau-Pontian ontology that is absent from other models. This is not, however, a ‘natural positivism’:
Being is an ontological leaf 19 of nature, is seen to be associated with an absolute quality of our world, yet this quality is irreducible to nature’s varying demonstrable facets. In locating this relation between pre-objective Being and consciousness within a quasi- physical framework, it extends the flesh from its more abstract position as an ‘elemental,’ to being the foundation of the interplay between corporeality, consciousness and Being that Merleau-Ponty seeks.
Extending this corporeal element of nature as ‘living ground’ into everyday life, we might recognise a certain ecological/ethical imperative arising through our contact with nature. Although we cannot reduce our contact with the natural world to an engagement with Être sauvage, our place within nature as a physical entity remains an integral part of how this overall structure of Being is conceived. We have seen that the cultural contains the natural as a part of itself, contains, that is, something of pre-objective nature. Yet some kind of proximity to ‘wild’ nature (understood literally as forests or mountains, or the ocean), as that which is external to culture (even if it retains aspects of culture, as, say, a man-made forest), can be seen as bringing us closer to that foundation that is external to the cultural, and closer, then, to the pre-linguistic structures on which later structures of expression depend. By getting close to such ‘wild’ nature, we are drawing closer to this Schellingian ‘auto-production’ that is present in the physical characteristics of the natural, and thus drawing closer to some kind of pre-objective truth.
This might be read in terms of Heidegger’s exploration of dwelling. Although deeply involved with the cultural aspects of existence, dwelling is frequently presented via the
19 N, 204. 211 relationship between the ‘cultural’ and ‘natural.’ In the case of the peasant’s life, for example, they are demonstrated within activities such as tilling the soil, sheltering from the elements, engaging with natural phenomena present in the change of seasons, living on rivers, and so on. Although this is an aspect of Heidegger’s work that has been criticised as an overly romantic Luddism, 20 the importance of ‘irreducible nature’ can take Heidegger’s work past these very specific criticisms.
Genuine dwelling for Heidegger is responsive to physis ,21 which is the way that the
‘bringing forth’ of nature is conceived – “the arising of something from out of itself,” 22 as Heidegger describes it (reminding us of Merleau-Ponty defining nature as “the autoproduction of meaning”). Physis is one aspect of the ‘bringing forth’ of poiesis , the other being techne ,23 and we can see the way in which this ties our way of dwelling to the way we engage both nature and technology, further emphasising the importance of our relationship to technology as it is demonstrated via the notions of Bestand and Gestell discussed in Chapter 3. Openness to the ‘bringing forth’ of poiesis is therefore in part an openness to what we might describe as the ‘revealing qualities’ of nature, an openness to what Heidegger describes, in reference to technology, as the realm of “revealing and unconcealment . . . where al ētheia, truth, happens.” 24
In both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, contact with nature can be seen to instigate a deeper, more profound form of contact with ourselves , which is also a contact with truth.
Heidegger does not, however, locate this kind of connection within corporeal experience, and thus it never gains the concreteness found in Merleau-Ponty’s model of flesh. This said, Merleau-Ponty does not extend his study of nature and flesh into the expansive culturally centred ontological model we locate within Heideggerian dwelling. There 20 Julian Young offers a response to the criticism of luddism that comes, in particular, out of his reading of Heidegger’s essay ‘The Turning’. HLP, 75-80. 21 The Greek term for nature. 22 QCT, 317. 23 HLP, 40-1. 24 QCT, 319. 212 would, therefore, seem to be much ecological, ontological and ethical promise in a study that explored these two principles in unison.
In a statement that highlights this ‘living’ element of ground and echoes the Romantic shift towards nature, Merleau-Ponty describes of his final aim as an alternative ontology that involves “a rethinking of the human in its relation to other beings and especially in its relation to animals.” 25 The Romantic importance of ‘animal being,’ which is all but absent from Heidegger’s account, further illustrates to us the sensory nature of what he is
∗ articulating: “my body . . . in a circuit with the world, an Einfühlung with the world, with the things, with the animals, with other bodies (as having a perceptual ‘side’ as well) made comprehensible by this theory of the flesh.”26 The idea of circuit takes the flesh beyond any theological associations to found it as a sensory and corporeal communication, central to any understanding of ‘wild’ Being. Beyond being “caught up in the tissue of things,” we are caught up in a constant state of communication with them, a communication that we understand through the flesh to be dependent on this ‘being caught up,’ a state that determines, and structures, meaning.
Again and again in Merleau-Ponty we are oriented to the truth value of our embodied state as a communicative contact with the world, yet reminded that this is firstly a corporeal communication, which holds tight to its irreducible core. Considering ‘flesh’ and ‘circuit’ together, we face a metaphoric evocation that, besides breath, eating and motility, might also recall cellular exchange, the semi-permeability of human skin, the constant act of cellular and molecular transfer that maintains the living body. The flesh, that is, locates us within the ‘hard’ sciences, as well as philosophy. It names a literal act 25 Jean-Philippe Deranty, ‘Witnessing the Inhuman: Agamben or Merleau-Ponty’ in South Atlantic Quarterly . Vol. 107, No. 1. Winter 2008. 177. ∗ Empathy/Empathie 26 N, 209. 213 of exchange, and joins this with the sensory and ontological characteristics that are carried within a more metaphorical interpretation.
Schelling and Merleau-Ponty share the belief that European philosophy lacks a living ground, and Schelling’s ‘barbaric principle’ and its subsequent adoption and transformation by Merleau-Ponty, is an attempt to name this ground. The problem, then, is how to conceive of this “barbarian” element in such a way that it produces a ‘living’ result; how to conceive of it in what Heidegger might describe as a ‘non-metaphysical’ way. 27 The question of nature’s irreducibility remains an integral part of this ‘living’ element of ground, and we come to see that the quest for a living ground, which names the problem and promise of nature, comes to name a problem in some respects more immediate to subjectivity: that of life itself and its relationship to meaning. In this movement through Schelling and Husserl, from Schelling’s ‘barbaric principle’ into
Merleau-Ponty’s adoption of Husserl’s prereflective addressing of the ‘lifeworld,’ what is at issue then is this irreducibility of Être sauvage as the ‘problem’ of life.28
The ‘living’ ground of philosophy, that which escapes reduction but which ‘requires incorporation,’ is therefore conceived of as the same living ground of the human organism itself, the living ground of the physical entity: in many respects this seems so obvious as to not require putting into words, but glancing back over the history of
Western philosophy this is clearly not so, and where Merleau-Ponty’s take on this deviates from its philosophical ancestry it bears important consequences. So long as language can be located within this ‘carnal knowing,’ to name ground as in this respect
‘living’ (and thus both transcendent and within the world) offers a way to reconsider the
27 Vallier, 2000. 86. 28 Understanding ‘life’ here in its natural sense, as the state of a living being, and more generally, as that characteristic applied to all beings. 214 abyss of reason and language that is opened by Kant, and deepened by Novalis and a host of thinkers through to and beyond Heidegger and Derrida. Truth is in this way inscribed as a living truth within the world, as it is inscribed within ourselves: nature is the concept that unites the truth of the world and that of the subject.
Conceiving of nature as the autoproduction of meaning indicates that in nature there is no difference between meaning and reality; 29 here is the concretion of Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “there is meaning, but it is carnal.” Meaning is inscribed within the world as it is inscribed within us: ontological truth is the truth of the living organism within an environment.
But what is this quality of ‘livingness’ that is present within the organism? In fact, the irreducibility we meet in the organism in Romanticism, the meaning of the whole over its parts, is a driving force for Merleau-Ponty also. This is true from his earliest writings.
Already in the Structure of Behaviour life is central, for what is the question of behaviour other than the question of the action of the organism, its interaction with its environment and other organisms; in short, life. A significant presence behind the Phenomenology , a figure referenced constantly, is Kurt Goldstein, whose studies on behaviour and organism are consistently referenced . What drives the organism, animates it, is life. What structures meaning, is life. It is life which lies behind Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of nature.
Life, in this sense, is meaning, but it is not reducible to any structure of meaning.
Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity is, in these terms, an attempt to introduce a dialectic that can account for the irreducibility of life itself.
29 Barbaras, 2005. 222. 215 Life, Ecology and the Pre-Linguistic
“Living” is thus the name of that which precedes the reduction and
finally escapes all the divisions that the later gives rise to. 30
Jacques Derrida
Derrida pens these lines in his discussion of Husserl, stating that the unity of transcendent and empirical consciousness in Husserl, which can neither be conflated nor divided, is thus located in the question of life. Life here refers to the ‘basic characteristic of living beings,’ yet “Husserl characterizes transcendental activity as life,”31 which means that life suggests something that exceeds the physicality in which it is based. Life is argued to escape philosophical division by being both this expression of physical/biological existence, as an entity, yet at the same time not being reducible to that existence. This overlap of transcendental and ‘natural,’ Derrida argues, makes possible “a worldliness capable of sustaining, or in some way nourishing, transcendentality .” 32 It is precisely such a worldliness that Merleau-Ponty is searching for.
Life is here defined by a kind of holism, the excess of the organism’s whole over its physical parts. Life is both expressive and transcendent. The location of the transcendental within physicality leads Barbaras to claim that “Life is thus nothing other than the “nothing” that at once joins and divides the transcendental and the psychological, or rather life is the condition of the possibility of the nothing as the peculiar unity of transcendental phenomenology and phenomenological psychology.” 33 With this transcendent ‘remainder,’ life can then be understood in terms of this barbaric remnant of
30 Barbaras, 2005. 207. 31 ibid., 206-7. 32 Derrida, Speech and Phenomena in Barbaras, 2005. 207. 33 Barbaras, 2005. 207-8. 216 Schelling; the remnant of the transcendental within the empirical, which is the irreducible remainder discovered in Of Human Freedom. 34 Life is expression, and life is the pre- linguistic transcendence of meaning present within any subsequent meaning structures.
It is within the body, as the site of expression’s emergence, that this is most apparent to us. The body is the way in which we enact a life that is both cultural and natural, linguistic and pre-linguistic. At the same time, one thing indicated here is that there is no absolute separation in these categories. Within Merleau-Ponty’s conception of nature and the greater framework of his ontology of the flesh, there emerges a kind of ‘corporeal absolute’ that locates the structures of meaning within the structures of life: we see this in the earlier discussion originating in the Phenomenology and through to the collocation of flesh and truth. Throughout Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, we therefore discover a model of meaning that is grounded within the lived body . This permits the claim that all meaning is rooted in corporeal life.
Here also lies the transcendence of that body through its entry into meaning. Life is, logically enough, the subject of the ‘lifeworld,’ and life is irreducible to any particular act or representation. Yet despite this irreducibility, for Merleau-Ponty life is expression.
Expression contains the seeds of irreducibility, of transcendence. What is transcendent within expression might still resonate at the level of that embodied subjectivity, and thus within corporeally structured expression. What is beyond the level of empirical consciousness, therefore, may still carry its own ‘non-language significations,’ may carry various levels of meaning, of which its transcendent element is but one aspect.
34 Shusterman, 2005. 168. 217 It is these non-language significations which need to be incorporated into philosophy.
In writing that the living ground of philosophy which ‘requires incorporation’ is this living ground of the human organism itself and its ‘remainder,’ we understand this
‘living ground’ as that which takes in all the elements within the flux of existence.
Objects reach towards us, engage us, so that they are in a sense alive for us – not in this understanding of biological life, but in the way they move in and out of our being, constantly folding into and out of our visual field, our meaning structures, and to a lesser extent, our bodies themselves, as breath, as food, as a pebble I might take and engulf with my hand, and in so doing absorb a certain amount of energy from it, its coolness, perhaps, that it in turn absorbed from the river. Consciousness, life, energy and atoms all join in a meaning structure which is engaged via the reversibility of perceptual experience that is described so evocatively as the flesh.
The philosophy of life therefore encompasses the full spectrum of that organism’s connectivity with its environment.
This might be seen to echo a model of life extrapolated from James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. 35 In Gaia, life is also a kind of remnant, a necessity or principle that precedes the system itself: the planet conceived of as a living web of connection, which expands
Gaia’s model of living relation beyond the bounds of biological life. Life is understood in terms of an ecological system, remembering that the principal meaning of ecology is relation : a system which is made up of living and dead matter just as the human body is comprised of skin, muscle, hair and fingernail. This is not to distract us from the fact that it is a philosophy of consciousness that begins in life that occupies the centre of Merleau-
Ponty’s project, but to take him at his word, understanding the extent of corporeal
35 See James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth . Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979. 218 communicative reciprocity as bearing not only on language but all our relations with ourselves and each other, as well as our environment.
This reciprocity is the basis of all expression. It allows linguistic communication, allows consciousness. It is the corporeal facticity of the body and the folding back of the seen upon the seer, the echo of the world within the subject that brings about the possibility of meaning. It is the flesh: understood as this body that allows us to run, breathe and think, the world in which each such action is an expressive exchange, and language, as that which arises within a body within the world and brings that relationship into new form.
This ‘living relation’ and its status as a ‘non-language signification’ might be deepened by looking at ‘transcendent’ forms of experience. The experience of nature as a form of sublimity,36 for example, such as is felt by the rock climber, illustrates a meaning that is outside reduction; yet if we are to take the idea of ‘non-language significations’ seriously we might understand it to be a very strong communication, an envelopment in the flesh that communicates entirely from the realm of the non-instituted. This is an experience of the whole environment: sky, rock, water, earth; the subject released into the air with each breath, vision reaching out into the distance and folding the viewer into the depths of the visual field; a melding of consciousness with the surroundings so that the ‘kind of blending’ that takes place, the dissolution of subject and object, is palpable.
Subjectivity here is simultaneously broken down (the self-abnegation of the blending of subject and world) and reinforced (as the perceived strengthening of one’s sense of self that dwells within any ecstatic experience) in a process that finds perhaps greater comfort within Buddhist doctrine than that of Western philosophy.
36 By which I do not mean the sublime of Longinus or Kant, or even the idealised sublime that develops so distinctly in late Romanticism, but rather a sublime as an experience of nature which, in a positive sense, seems to intrinsically transcend capture. 219 What is particular about meaning’s emergence here, within this experience of ‘excess,’ is that it seems most intensified the greater its negativity: something that characterises various forms of sublime experience. From the perspective of the subject, such experience is typified by a remainder; that which cannot be incorporated into established structures of meaning, but gives rise at the same time to a meaning that is distinguished by this connection and is itself that excess.
From the perspective of the poet who, after having such an experience, later attempts to articulate it, all symbolic or non-symbolic structures of communications come back to this chiasmic sense of self amidst world. One searches back through the body for the emergence of language within such experience. (—Searching for the right word in a poem, I find myself unconsciously manipulating the air with my fingers, as if to draw a new word through the torso .) Despite working with symbols, the poet’s creative moment echoes the painter: “The painter “takes his body with him,” says Valéry. Indeed we cannot imagine how a mind can paint. It is only by lending his body to the world that the artist changes the world into paintings.” 37 In a different sense, then, this is true of the poet also, for he or she attempts to draw a pre-linguistic moment of linguistic emergence through the body.
The ‘transcendence of materiality’ we discover within ‘sublime experience’ is not altogether different from that of everyday engagement, except in this way that it so definitively resists assimilation into existing patterns of thought that it foregrounds a meaning that is definitively beyond encapsulation. And yet, as a meaning that is ‘lived rather than known,’ it is powerful and unmistakable.
37 EM, 123. 220 Describing this form of meaning’s reinforcement through this instance of negativity might begin by proffering the perpetual presence of non-meaning within any meaning structure, that which supplies meaning being the ‘opening upon the world’: the flesh which is equally dependent for its meaning on the visible and the invisible; the denial of complete linguistic meaning as the continued presence of that world within any utterance, as an irreducible. In Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy, there is a continual allocation of the invisible to the realm of the visible as that which allows its integration into consciousness, that which “lends it structure.” The chiasmic intertwining of subject and world, from language through to life, is thus itself seen as constituted by difference .
The absence of demonstrable meaning thereby becomes the very possibility of meaning’s formation. This is the silence that dwells within language “and without which it would say nothing.” 38 The indeterminacy of the body is here both as the ‘remainder’ of life as the kind of irreducible identified in Husserl by Derrida, and from an existential perspective, the ‘vague’ and ‘implicit’ nature of embodied Being that emerges within the bodily origins of language in the Phenomenology , and which we examined in our first foray into expression in the previous chapter.
In order for language to say anything meaningful about the world, it must recognise this ‘implicit and vague’ aspect of expression. Language requires a negativity: it requires the kind of opening that we perceive in this bodily indeterminacy. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of ambiguity, then, can be argued as the only way in which this chiasm of world, body and expression can be articulated and in which the transcendent irreducible of life can be expressed.
The unsayable structures the sayable just as the invisible structures the visible.
Douglas Low writes that “the invisible is the idea, the interior lining of expression , both
38 ILVS, 46. 221 perceptual and linguistic, that helps provide its structure or sense or logos.” 39 This lining, then, should not be considered a part of expression in the same way that a word is considered a part of speech and might be extracted to find its concrete place within grammar and diction. For expression, the invisible is that which, in this way, enables sense to emerge, but which cannot be integrated into the structures of sense which are thus enabled.
When Wittgenstein closes the Tractatus with a reference to what ‘cannot be put into words and therefore must be passed over in silence,’ his position ignores this interplay between negative meaning and meaning; they are not seen as opposites in the Merleau-
Pontian model, or for that matter the Heideggerian, but rather as two sides of the same object, one of which is concealed from view. Just as Wittgenstein was to spend the later part of his career breaking down the supposed certitudes which he had erected in his first study, so we too must reconfigure the edifice of meaning in order to see the transcendence upon which it relies.
We do this however, not as Derrida would have it, to deconstruct meaning’s foundations, but rather to cement them solidly in things—just not as a question of indubitable correspondence. In adopting the remnant, the un-meaning, the silent, as part of the intimate relation between meaning and its absence, we see the foundation of meaning shifted into a physical, multi-dimensional realm.
We might return to moments of sublime experience to identify a parallel between this linguistic irreducible which, via this diacritical space, can be argued as a reinforcement of language’s ability to ‘speak the world,’ and the irreducible of subjectivity that is faced in the sublime.
39 Low, 2000. 72. Emphasis in original. 222 Identifying corresponding descriptions of sublime experience in Kant and later
Romantics like Wordsworth and Emerson, Christopher Hitt describes the diminution of the subject before nature as being followed by an aggrandisement, which results from the assertion of reason over nature. 40 We immediately see the problem here – the ‘real’ world being subsumed by an ideality. However, in a philosophy where indeterminacy does not conflict with subjectivity, the need to forge an obdurate idol to reason at the very moment such reason is broken down is alleviated. Rather than this self-aggrandisement achieved through the positing of a subject empowered by reason, the sublime might more fruitfully be mined via the subject’s embracing of its transcendence. 41 This avoids both the understanding of subjectivity as ‘one with’ nature and an understanding of nature as a definitive ‘other,’ both of which are, for some commentators, part of the problem. 42
Such a re-imagining of our encounter with nature sees instead that the transcendent element that we face within nature is what locates us within that system: the barbarian remnant of self as being, in a sense, united with its origin. This echoes the correspondence of Saussure’s diacritics with Merleau-Ponty’s location of ambiguity within pre-linguistic, and subsequently linguistic, experience. Consciousness is, we remember, always intermingled with nature, and the idea of complete separation is equally false to that of any absolutely accomplished union. What we have, rather, is a
‘living relation,’ the essence of which is expressed via this irreducibility, this remainder that is life, and facets of which might be glimpsed through many of our relations with the world: the amalgam of linguistic, logical, sensory and bodily experience.
40 Christopher Hitt, ‘Towards an Ecological Sublime’ in New Literary History . Vol. 30 No. 3, 1999. 608. 41 By which emphasis I mean that reason, too, as a product of language, might be argued as in some respects transcendent, but in the assertion of reason over the ‘unreason’ of the sublime, we lose contact with that point of sublime articulation. 42 Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature. Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press, 1992. 101-2. 223 The expression of this ‘remnant’ of life, this primordial that is granted via a contact with the non-instituted, remains the key. For Merleau-Ponty, philosophy is an expression of this brute contact with the world: philosophy “asks of our experience of the world what the world is before it is a thing one speaks of and which is taken for granted.” As such “it directs this question to our mute life, that precedes reflection.” 43 The expression of this mute life, this ‘silence,’ with an explicit language of reflection remains the question, even if we follow Merleau-Ponty in identifying threads of silence that run through speech, and recognise the importance of the irreducible within any idea of meaning. How does this irreducible enter such language? How does the language of philosophy come to express silent transcendence that is life itself?
If philosophy lacks this engagement with our ‘silence,’ our pre-reflexive, it is capable of giving us but a world “reduced to our idealizations and our syntax.” 44 The validity of the discipline itself is therefore at stake.
Here is the value of the flesh within ontology, for our corporeal knowing is the birth of language within us. The nature of this corporeal contact is, as we have seen, crystallised via the concept of the flesh. Our entry into meaning is only accomplished through the body as an acting, breathing, biological entity. It is as such an entity, as a living being that interacts with its environment, that the subject engages with phenomena and subsequently comes to express them. Yet what is required is an explicit language of the flesh. Such a language would share many characteristics of negativity and indeterminacy that are foregrounded in the Romantics and Heidegger. It would be a language rich in the
‘vibration of poetic saying,’ a language in which an opening upon ‘unmeaning,’ a fragmentary presentation of truth, is equally an opening upon the world. Merleau-Ponty
43 VI, 102. 44 ibid. 224 names explicitly what this language of pre-linguistic opening would be, and as we shall see, it correspondence closely to his own rich and sensory expression.
Silence, Linguistic Negativity and Expression of the Primordial
The ultimate question, which is at the horizon of the Visible and the
Invisible, is of the mode of unity between expression and perception,
truth and experience; the response to this question requires a return
to the perceived that begins with the knowledge of the study of
expression.
Renaud Barbaras 45
Once we have oriented subjectivity via this ‘remnant’ in nature, and understood the flesh as this opening upon Being as a pre-linguistic communication between subject and world that is based on mutual perceptual exchange, we face, with Merleau-Ponty, the possibility of articulating the ground of Être sauvage , and thus of elucidating a non- instituted philosophical ground. Yet our ‘tools’ for such an exercise remain what they have always been: linguistic ones. Although we may recognise within nature the pre- linguistic living ground of subjectivity and meaning, and recognise via our relationship with nature that such a ground dwells within us as subjects, we are still left with the question of its articulation.
Merleau-Ponty offers no specific link between the flesh and the world: the flesh is thus seen to engage ‘wild’ Being within this perceptual interchange between subject and world, a link of perceptual embodiment, a link which although itself characterised by the 45 “La question ultime, qui est à l’horizon du Visible et l’invisible , est celle du mode d’unité entre l’expression et la perception, la vérité et l’expérience ; la réponse à cette question exige de revenir au perçu à partir des acquis de l’étude de l’expression .” Barbaras, 2000. 50. 225 kind of indeterminacy for which Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has become famous, orients us to ontological truth because it is of the same substance as that world itself: because they share the element of flesh. Language does not explain things, does not name them with a precision of correspondence, but rather ‘incarnates’ them with its speech gestures, with its particular style, colour and tonality 46 — in this way, language gives the flesh a voice .
The revelatory possibilities of the flesh aside, its non-specificity does throw up potential problems, and we might then wonder to what degree it represents a failure on behalf of Merleau-Ponty to articulate more precisely the consequences of an ontology based within the communicative exchange of embodied subjectivity. The flesh has a meaning that veers between the scientific, the metaphorical and the mythological. It is an
‘element’ not in the common sense that science attaches to the word, he tells us, 47 but rather like water or fire, an ancient and one might say obsolete use of the word. It articulates a certain coming together within phenomenological experience, yet it is not reducible to the specifics of that experience and instead needs to be understood as the principle of this flux, a midpoint between physicality and idea, word and thing.
The flesh is first introduced as an expression of boundary, yet a boundary defined by intersubjectivity: just as our experience moves in and out of the experience of others, determining it and in some respects being determined by it, the flesh as physical fact is in a constant state of exchange with its environment, touching and being touched, seeing and being seen, emitting and absorbing gasses, seeping fluids. It contains the body and demarcates its borders, yet remains porous, semi-permeable. We do not live in isolation,
46 Bernard Andrieu, ‘Le langage entre chair et corps’ in François Heidsieck Merleau-Ponty: Le philosophe et son langage . Grenoble, Research Sur La Philosophie et le Langage, 1993. 58. 47 ibid., 139. 226 but because we breathe and eat, because we act in a certain way – touch, make love, see, hear, speak, smell...
There is a sensuality within the flesh. The flesh is, literally, the meat on our bones, the membranous surfaces that permit the deepest embodied expression of our relationships to others. To be a sensual being is to express a pre-linguistic modality of one’s bodily nature. Within acts of sensuality also, life is expression, taken shape in the physical flesh.
Barbaras, surprisingly, describes the concept of flesh as something of a failure, into which “the difficulties, if not the impossibility, of Merleau-Ponty’s last ontology are concentrated.” 48 For Barbaras, this lack is rooted in an inability to properly account for the specifics of our flesh: reductively, we might say that the flesh remains too metaphorical, and as a metaphor between the body as a real object, the world as a physical entity, and the world of language and ideas, fails to properly account for organic, physical being which orients Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.
Yet the success of the term ‘flesh’ can only be judged by what it is intended to express: the question of whether its status between idea and metaphor, its representation of physicality and ‘meta-physicality,’ ends up making it say too much or too little and ultimately muting it, must be considered via the patency of this idea. What is the language by which this new reflection might succeed, by which we might speak Being via the expression of our specific entanglement with the world? What terminology might we employ to express the ontological overlay of mind and body? If we are to collapse the mind/body duality, it is clearly not to collapse one into the other, but rather in order that they are reformed into a new conceptual space.
48 Renaud Barbaras, ‘The Ambiguity of the Flesh’ in Chiasmi International No.4: Merleau-Ponty, Figures and Grounds of the Flesh. Paris, Vrin, 2002. 21. 227 The difficulty of the flesh is that it attempts to name that which, as Merleau-Ponty points out, has no name in philosophy and has no clearly defined conceptual space to occupy: it is neither matter nor substance nor the visible; neither a sum of facts nor a representation of mind. 49 Barbaras’ criticism, it should be emphasised, is directed to
Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology in general, and sees the flesh as representative of a certain failure of philosophical explication, but not to completely express that failure in itself.
There is certainly some validity to this criticism, but the failures of Merleau-Ponty to make a full account of an ontology of embedded, corporeal subjectivity must also be viewed with regards to the transcendent nature of that which is expressed in this
‘elemental.’
We might read this failure, then, to be of the “difficulties, if not impossibilities” of a precise linguistic expression of such an ontology, and that as such the flesh expresses as aptly as any term might, the perceptual, conceptual, physical, linguistic chiasm that is subjectivity as a localised meaning-rich yet transcendent experience within time and space.
The difficulty in judging the flesh as concept is thus the same difficulty as that of judging the flesh as fact. What is the philosophical language required to name that which is “midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea”? 50 If we cannot conceive of another mode of expression for this notion, then the metaphorical aspect of the flesh might be seen to elevate it from an abstract idea to an embodied possibility, so we are joined by ideation and earth, skin and schematics, to our experience of the everyday and to our most profound meanderings of mind and spirit.
If Être sauvage cannot be articulated via a positive discourse, the indeterminate elements of the flesh – its impossibiliteis – are also its success, allowing it to open upon 49 VI, 139. 50 ibid. 228 and possibly express this ‘fecund negative.’ The metaphorical plurality of the concept of flesh allows it to meet a corresponding ontological negative. The flesh represents the fundamental correspondence between subject and subject, and subject and world, by which communication is possible, and for Merleau-Ponty both subjectivity and communication are oriented via negativity.
Via the flesh, we are ourselves seen as articulations of ground; not as ‘solid’ entities that illustrate an empiricism based in physical presence, or the abstract ‘I’ of idealism, but as the locating of subjectivity within this flux of reciprocal exchange that the flesh names as the coming into being of meaning. Meaning here represents a joining of the empirical with the transcendental: the world as an entity, absolute and unquestionable, 51 with meaning as that transcendence that is birthed within the flesh. Yet if pre-linguistic
Being is implicit in perceptual experience, how might philosophy express it? What, in the words of Barbaras, is the “mode of unity between expression and perception, truth and experience”? The answer that emerges above is that it is the corresponding indeterminacy between expression and subjectivity, between meaning and world, between the meaning of the body and that of language, which allows us to consider a linguistic opening upon
‘wild’ Being and to thus conceive of this unity.
This ‘living’ ground, then, requires negative articulation. “ One cannot make a direct ontology,” Merleau-Ponty tells us: “My “indirect” method ( being in the beings ) is alone confirmed with being— —“negative philosophy” like “negative theology.”” 52 To articulate it relies on an expressive form which might engage negativity as negativity . It
51 Yes, unquestionable , for as Merleau-Ponty writes: “To ask oneself whether the world is real is to fail to understand what one is asking, since the world is not a sum of things which might always be called into question, but the inexhaustible reservoir from which things are drawn.” PhP, 401. 52 VI, 179. My emphasis. 229 is Merleau-Ponty’s connection of the indeterminacy of embodied, linguistic beings with
B/being that allows this mode of disclosure.
‘Engaging negativity as negativity’ is a matter of reflecting the silence of the world which dwells within the word: a ‘silent logos’ as a ‘fecund negative,’ the full presence of sound to come as a non-linear relation of world and meaning that is oriented via the body. It is the open and relational quality of our meaning structures that continue to orient this silence, that allow a positive language permeated by negativity. In the
Phenomenology’s chapter ‘The Thing and the Natural World,’ Merleau-Ponty describes the way in which we are penetrated physically by things and how this makes us creatures of living relation, 53 and he finishes this book with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s statement that “man is but a network of relationships.” 54 As living entities, we are in corporeal, linguistic relationships with Being, and it is this network of relationships which sees the corresponding negativity of body and language as modelled on the negativities of beings/Being. Language is the expression of life as an expression of these relationships.
Yet such relationships are in a perpetual state of readjustment, and philosophy and language must reflect these relations if they are to reflect the world.
Negative ontology therefore relies on the integration of silence that “envelops the speech anew” – “this silence will not be the contrary of language” 55 but rather the invisible of languages visible, the pre-meaning ‘without which language would say nothing.’ It is the body that continues to orient and permit this silence, for it is within the reversibility of the flesh’s perceptual chiasm, at the site of the body, that the interplay of
53 Glen A. Mazis, ‘Chaos Theory and Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology’ in Dorothy Olkowski and James Morley, Eds. Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World. Albany, State University of New York, 1999. 233. 54 Antoin de Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de Guerre in PhP, 530. 55 Both these citations VI, 179. 230 language, the joining of utterance, sense and silence, is revealed in its full, yet indeterminate, presence. Any integration of silence into language, any newly conceived process of reflection, will then need to remain grounded in the body, not as ‘dumb flesh,’ but rather as a knowing that is grounded in perception itself.
Merleau-Ponty interrogates the nature of this integration of silence and language in
The Visible and the Invisible, directing us towards a new reflection, what is described as a hyper-reflection (sur-réflexion). 56 Here language is the transcendence of a universe of ideas, yet is still rooted in the world. This hyper-reflection , we are told,
would set itself the task of thinking about [the brute thing and brute perception], of
reflecting on the transcendence of the world as transcendence, speaking of it not
according to the law of the word-meanings inherent in the given language, but with a
perhaps difficult effort that uses the significations of words to express, beyond
themselves, our mute contact with the things, when they are not yet things said. [ . . .
Reflection] must seek in the world itself the secret of our perceptual bond with it. It must
use words not according to their pre-established signification, but in order to state this
prelogical bond. It must plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must descend
towards it such as it is instead of working its way back up towards a prior possibility of
thinking it—which would impose upon the world in advance the conditions of our
control over it. It must question the world, it must enter into the forest of references that
our interrogation arouses in it, it must make it say, finally, what in its silence it means to
say . . . . 57
Our expression of silence is therefore dependent upon a new form of reflection and a new relationship with language, which would not attempt to reduce the transcendent into the empirical, but express it as itself. Such a language, in speaking ‘beyond itself’ would rely 56 VI, 38. 57 ibid, 38-9. 231 equally upon positively and negatively conceived linguistic relationships. This newly conceived relationship is to be established through a deliberate engagement with the primordial roots of language and reflection: the origins of reflection searched out within the meeting of perceptual experience and the innate transcendence of word-meanings, the origins of language engaged, within this same space (for where do we draw the line between the two?), as a proximity between word and thing, a seeking of the pre-logical articulation between word and world.
This new reflection, we are told, must “plunge into the world instead of surveying it, it must . . .” but let’s stop a moment here; isn’t the metaphorical richness of this writing, again, both too profound to go uncommented on, as well as too full to be reduced to a rigorous philosophy? How does reflection “plunge into the world”? Is this a reflection that, should we be able to pin it down in some way it, occurs within the chiasm of the flesh – somehow spacing itself between the perceptual envelope and the world of language as a system of meanings? If so, is it possible for us to enact such an engagement? Can we continue to understand the diacritical relationship between words, the open meeting between word and subject and world, as allowing such a reconception?
Does this bring us back to the idea of ‘opening’ that we find in Saussure, that is, into
“perception as divergence”?58
The only way we might conceive of reflection ‘plunging into the world’ is to imagine a form of reflection that bases itself within a more physically conceived language: to understand such a ‘plunging’ in this way allows us to view the passage quite literally.
Reflection, being necessarily a linguistic activity, might thus be seen to approach a
‘language of things’ through an alternative engagement with them: its ‘plunging’ as the reconception of our relationships with the world via a more open, more embodied, more embedded language .
58 VI, 201. 232 For reflection to seek the secret of our perceptual bond with the world, and to employ words to state this pre-logical bond, rather than according to their pre-established signification, is to suggest that the necessary path for philosophy to achieve this particular end is one that approaches the syntactical severing and metaphoric reliance of the poem.
Beyond this stated need to deviate from normal word meanings, in all Merleau-Ponty’s writings there is a reliance on metaphor and image that penetrates deeply into the work. It is not only the surface of expression that employs these metaphorical understandings – to
‘solidify,’ that is, notions that have been established through more literal discourses.
When we begin to analyse his way of expression, we discover a depth of image that goes to the very heart of his thesis. Merleau-Ponty seeks to express an irreducible which is structurally enmeshed within his means of expression . Reading these texts with this in mind, there emerge a myriad of metaphorical and imagistic representations of his thought, such that, arguably, we might begin to access the work on an entirely new level, in which the means of philosophy itself holds equal stature to its content, becomes a form of cognition in itself – a form of thought, of ‘hyper-reflection,’ which like a poem cannot be reduced to the pool of words within which it circulates.
In the Preface to the Phenomenology , for instance, Merleau-Ponty makes a contradistinction that goes to the very heart of his thinking, contrasting a descriptive
“return to things themselves” to abstract “scientific schematisation,” stating the latter to be comparable to geography in comparison to an experience of what “a forest, prairie or river is.” 59 In another ecologically inspired metaphor, this time from The Visible and the
Invisible, we read of our hyper-reflection as an entry into a “forest of references” that is
59 PhP, ix-x. 233 itself possessed of a will – that itself “ means to say” something. Language, in a metaphor which suggests the foundation of the subject and directs us to linguistic silence, is elsewhere expressed as “this great mute land;”60 the linguistic connective relations that exist between subject and world and subject and subject are also expressed as a nervure, a vein of a leaf or an insect wing: “there is an essence beneath us, a common nervure of the signifying and the signified.” 61 For each example cited here, there are hundreds more.
Further, we see a reliance upon a particular form of metaphor: these are naturalistic, visceral metaphors, which emphasise the physical and mental connection between subject and language. Galen Johnson, in an essay that looks closely at the marine and forest metaphors which Merleau-Ponty employs, writes that Merleau-Ponty is a philosopher of beginnings, that we find in him “a philosophy of natality and first things.” 62 One nuance of this thought is that such metaphor acts as a kind of epoché, a stripping-back the words behind which our world sometimes hides and sometimes reveals itself. A stripping back of the linguistic, that is, to reveal its pre-linguistic roots.
The oceanic images also make an interesting appearance in The Prose of the World, where we read of an “operant or speaking language, whose words have a silent life like animals at the bottom of the ocean and come together or separate according to the needs of their lateral or indirect signification.” 63 Although not the most elegant of his metaphors, it offers a rich representation of the individual life that Merleau-Ponty (and
Heidegger) attributes to language – again, the word has a will of its own. It is also a good analogy for the mysterious depths of language, for what more densely imaginative silence is there than the deep ocean and the creatures that dwell there?
60 VI, 126. 61 ibid., 118. 62 Galen A. Johnson, ‘The Problem of Origins: in the Timber Yard, Under the Sea’ in Chiasmi International, New Series, Vol 2, From Nature to Ontology. Paris, Vrin, 2000. 249, 250. 63 PW, 87. 234
François Dastur writes that in Merleau-Ponty “language is therefore considered as this living body from where the ideal is born, rather than as an inert instrument of its communication.” 64 When we consider this reliance on metaphor, we realise that this is not only a theoretical stance on language, but that Merleau-Ponty enacts such an expression. The effect here is to give a physical imagistic presence to linguistic connections that are otherwise conceived of as abstract. Ironically, the metaphor might be seen to escape the possibility of the sign’s emptiness by speaking in symbol.
Meaning and truth do not arrive through the correspondence of a sign to its established meaning, but by speaking the world into language. The removal of the possibility of direct correspondence creates this particular opportunity for the entry of a truth of everyday experience, of image: the need to search the world for the connective relationships which match the content of what is expressed. To write with metaphor is one way of placing abstract ideas within concrete ‘objects’ and palpable sensations by rendering the meaning of the utterance in closer proximity to personal history. Meaning is open, destabilised, in some respects, negative; and yet, it is visceral, embodied. In fact, these visceral embodied characteristics are its negativity.
Language, that is, gains a proximity to the body, to life, in the same movement that it gains negativity. As we saw in the Phenomenology , embodiment is defined by a certain irreducibility, an indeterminacy, and life, as it emerged above, is inherently transcendent.
The closer to embodied life language comes, the more such linguistic indeterminacy is apparent, the more language draws from the silent meaning of the world, rather than from established linguistic and cultural conceptual structures of meaning.
64 “La langue est donc ici considérée comme ce corps vivant d’où naît l’idéal, plutôt que comme l’instrument inerte de sa communication.” Françoise Dastur, Chair et Langue: Essais sur Merleau-Ponty , Encre Marine, Fougères, 2001. 49. 235
One thing that emerges within this open and ambiguous language is a breakdown of the precise line between a metaphoric and literal discourse. The ‘chiasm,’ for instance, might not be dismissed as ‘merely metaphoric’ because it seeks to express literally the relation of crossover between these various elements. This is a literal act of interrelation, of joining. Yet the term depends for its understanding upon an imagistic taking up of its elements as though they all possessed a concrete materiality.
There is a sense, then, in which the term seems to gain a literalness that it does not in fact possess. What, after all, is joining in the chiasm? The seer and the seen, the touching and the touched, the body and the mind, and, above all, the body and the world... the term, in fact, might be seen to express equally a breakdown of difference as it does the literal idea of joining. Phillip Wheelwright, in The Burning Fountain , writes that “poetic language implicitly crossweaves multiplicity-in-unity and unity-in-multiplicity;” 65 an idea that resonates deeply with the overall direction of Merleau-Ponty’s project – crossweaving, which is itself a metaphor that fits neatly over some of the interpretations of chiasm, moves towards the kind of anti-dualist holism of a ‘unity within difference’ which increasingly comes to characterise Merleau-Ponty’s work: we cannot ignore l’écart , the gap, which separates us from the world, but it is only via this unity, expressed as the flesh, that the world, as our perceptual horizon, is meaningful.
Even when not employing the physical characteristics of organisms and natural objects and spaces, Merleau-Ponty’s language is frequently grounded in some form of physical or biological phenomena – not surprising when we consider the posture of his philosophy as a whole. This illustrates to us a deep level of resonance between the imagistic representations of specific points of theory and the overall architecture of expression in
65 Phillip Wheelwright, The Burning Fountain. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1968. 102. 236 his work. So many of these metaphors locate the subject as in some respects entwined with the world – whether it be geographically, geologically, spatially, organically, linguistically or creatively.
When he states, for example, that the “body is in the world as the heart is in the organism; it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system,”66 we see a complex series of connections emerge, functioning on a number of levels: the metaphor extends from a somewhat more literal statement of the essential nature of bodily being and dependence, to the intersubjectivity of experience, through to an affiliation with the biological sciences and the propounding of a kind of organically based holism. Beginning with the simile of embodiment and organism, the comparison is deepened and extended, ending on a universal level with the idea of system. Literal meanings, and what we might describe as sub-literal meanings, are brought into play, so that the work impacts us at various levels of meaning also – some of which, I would argue, impact and function in some respects behind language .
But does meaning really function ‘behind language’? Can we claim a sense in which we take this idea into the body and understand it there, at the level of the senses; that we know what it is to breathe and thus our breath is part of this meaning, understanding intuitively via the reflex of respiration this necessity of symbiosis? Such an understanding would echo the idea of ‘plunging into the world,’ taking for granted an existent meaning beyond the consciously verbal chain in which philosophy is generally understood to function, and pointing towards what we might describe as a bodily located understanding that we find, both thematically and in expressive form, throughout
Merleau-Ponty’s work.
66 PhP, 235. 237
Certainly there are potential problems here. Even should we accept such extra- linguistic modalities of understanding, the nature of the irreducible leaves us at an impasse as to how they might be unpacked through further explanation: this is the nut of
Barbaras’ criticism. As we saw above, however, this irreducibility is the root of Merleau-
Ponty’s success. Further, it seems quite viable that there are levels of communication and understanding that exist beyond what is explicitly linguistic: they are implicit within our experiences of our senses and our bodies, within our everyday phenomenological experience of the world, and might become definitive when attempting to encapsulate sublime experiences of art or nature. For Merleau-Ponty they are apparent within speech as “the texture of the linguistic gesture” 67 – the subtleties of syntax and timing, voice and intonation; yet they are not contained in that gesture except in the most opaque fashion.
For Merleau-Ponty we grasp the tangible and intangible concurrently, yet one is not reducible into the other.
In this regard, we meet a further objection: that metaphor is not unique, and in fact all meaningful communication carries these elements of stated and un-stated, linguistic and extra-linguistic. What metaphor does, however, is open the field of signification more forcefully on the lived dimension from which language draws its meaning, open it upon the body and the crossover between the linguistic concept and the sensory bodily architecture. In this way, metaphor might itself be seen as an overarching (metaphoric) expression of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy.
Merleau-Ponty’s metaphors, being deeply embedded in a language of physical and naturalistic objects and properties, help to cement the connections between words and 67 ‘Phenomenology of Language’ in Signs , trans. Richard C. Mcleary. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1964. 89. 238 things just as it keeps meaning in play. Such play means that things expressed metaphorically are seen to mirror the activity of life more closely than a semantically closed language. If ‘language gives the flesh a voice,’ the language of metaphor is the language of flesh. In it, the flesh is enacted as a chiasm, finding form in a more open, more active, more embodied web of significations. The open, active, relational elements of metaphor, as well as other negative or indirect forms of disclosure, are thus seen to offer possibilities of articulation that do not exist within entirely resolvable logico- discursive structures.
We can see, then, why Merleau-Ponty’s desire to reach towards some kind of pre- linguistic articulation corresponds with an extensive and rich metaphoric language. Of course the metaphor relies upon the need for some kind of semantic sense, but in the deliberate redirection of established associations, such sense-making is used to take words beyond their usual boundaries. When Merleau-Ponty writes that “there is an essence beneath us, a common nervure of the signifying and the signified,” 68 the connection made between the linguistic ground and essence is sensory and tactile: although it might be explained, it cannot be entirely represented in other terms, for these sensory relationships are not reducible. The kinds of connections that are emerging here retain an element of necessary semantic failure, of linguistic negativity – we engage them, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, by ‘living’ them rather than ‘knowing’ them. For
Merleau-Ponty, then, this movement into the sensory is a movement into a form of truth.
It’s just not necessarily a truth that can be ‘held by the mind.’
The truth that might envelop us yet not be held by the mind is what Merleau-Ponty attempts to engage when he writes of a primordial silence, a meaning-rich pre-linguistic
68 VI, 118. 239 element of our phenomenological experience. Such truth contradicts conventional wisdom which says truth is only comprehensible when it can be ‘circumscribed.’
Metaphor, fragmentation and etymological retrieval are seen to mine the pre-linguistic and bring some expression of this truth before our eyes, not in any complete way, but rather, to borrow again from Merleau-Ponty, as though “to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire.” 69
The implications of this analysis go beyond sense experience: the flesh seeks an ontology out of its expression of chiasm, an ontology based in the unity of self and world, and self and self. Yet the flesh requires a language which might make it visible.
What The Visible and the Invisible establishes is that cognitive activity occurs only within an intermingling of knower and known, and that the idea of ‘objective’ knowledge is problematic from the outset, distorting the “interactive, bipolar nature of cognitive activity by assuming we know the world through disengaging ourselves from it.” 70 And yet, this is not relativistic, for there is a truth written into the body, into our place within the world:
—the flesh not as fact or sum of facts, but as the locus of an inscription of truth.—
Merleau-Ponty’s point, and we see this particularly in his interrogation of Descartes in
Section 3 of the Phenomenology , is that cognition is not strictly a mental exercise, but is rather a relational one:
Perception is precisely that kind of act in which there can be no question of setting the act
itself apart from the end to which it is directed. ... When Descartes tells us that the
69 PhP, xv. 70 Jerry H.Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor . New Jersey and London, Humanities Press, 1991. 57. 240 existence of visible things is doubtful, but that our vision, when considered as a mere
thought of seeing is not in doubt, he takes up an untenable position. 71
This collapsing of oppositions regarding thinking, language, and philosophical practice goes to the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s invisible, which is the invisible of, and in, this world, which renders the world itself visible. 72 Truth is defined by the field of relationships in which we find ourselves: perceptual, bodily, linguistic, social – a virtually infinite web characterised by this interdependence and blending. It is the more open field of signification, the fact that it is itself the closest to a ‘language of living relation,’ which makes metaphorical language more capable of addressing this relational aspect of truth.
For Merleau-Ponty language already possesses a firsthand engagement with the world; it is able to express the world via its simultaneous opening upon that world and via a corresponding negativity between expression and experience. Philosophy can speak because language does not hold to fixed meanings, but is, via its particular mélange of specificity and negativity, able to form new ideas, is able via this opening upon the known and the unknown, to contain the substance and character of new thought. Via this reliance on negativity we see strictly dialectical philosophy brought into question.
the words most charged with philosophy are not necessarily those that contain what they
say, but rather those that most energetically open upon Being, because they more closely
convey the life of the whole and make our habitual evidences vibrate until they disjoin.
Hence it is a question whether philosophy as reconquest of brute or wild being can be
accomplished by the resources of the eloquent language, or whether it would not be
71 ibid., 435-6. 72 VI, 151. 241 necessary for philosophy to use language in a way that takes from it its power of immediate
or direct signification in order to equal it with what it wishes all the same to say. 73
This is as direct a statement as we might find of the philosophical necessity of expressive negativity: it is only via the indirection of language that Merleau-Ponty sees such expressive capacity remaining open. Our engagement with Being is prior to language: before the philosopher speaks, such an engagement is founded in this silence of the chiasm. Yet language is born within this chiasm. The lesson of the flesh is that despite everything, the possibility exists for a language that reaches to the depth of Being. The ability of a language to articulate Être sauvage therefore rests in a language that might
‘convey the life of the whole’ – that words might exit the ‘enclosed’ system and enter a more direct engagement with the world.
This would be language that comes not, for example, from the closed borders of a technical discourse, but from the philosopher’s attempt to articulate his first hand envelopment in the world, in perceptual experience. “It is the error of the semantic philosophies,” we read, “to close up language as if it spoke only of itself: language lives only from silence; everything we cast to the others has germinated in this great mute land which we never leave.” 74
Language comes to be within the chiasm of embodied self and world, and while it can be continually oriented to this point of contact, it remains disclosure. But the chiasm, as the origin of expression, speaks the language of silence. This silence is the fecund irreducible of a life that is inherently expressive: lived life as an unfolding act of expression.
73 ibid., 102. 74 ibid., 126. 242 Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm speaks of the implicit expressivity of life itself. Yet just as life is irreducible to any one schema or linguistic representation, each schema, each representation, opens upon life as the point of its formation. The coming together of corporeality and linguistic birth within the flesh is echoed by a more active, living, open and metaphorical language. In this way, the negativity of Merleau-Ponty’s language is seen to echo the irreducibility and transcendence of life. A philosophy of lived existence must therefore take as its central point of departure the relationship between linguistic and pre-linguistic, spoken and unspoken, visible and invisible. In articulating silence, expression is seen to articulate the transcendent remainder of life.
This relationship is foregrounded in different ways by both Heidegger and Merleau-
Ponty, yet although Heidegger centrally positions existence within his inquiry, and grounds the discussion of Being and Time within lived life, his analysis, in avoiding a dialectic of presence, never engages life as a biological, corporeal question. This inability means his analysis remains what we might call ontocentric, bound to a conception of
Being that is outside beings. Thus although he focuses on the existential characteristics of life within his analysis, the absence from Heidegger’s discussion of the problematic of
‘living life,’ as it is demonstrated within individual entities, is accompanied by the lack of the characteristics of life: an absence of the physical, sensory, active, behavioural states and modalities of which life is comprised. As a consequence, we, as beings, remain alienated from the language of Being.
It is Merleau-Ponty’s grounding of expression within the modes and characteristics of beings that allows his discourse of primordial pre-cultural, pre-objective, pre-linguistic a level of concrete realisation that is absent from Heidegger’s account. We see this enacted in specific ways within his means of expression, his engagement with linguistic
243 corporeality finding tangible realisation within his writing. Although Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty converge on the need for a semantically open, poetic, ‘negative’ discourse to express the pre-linguistic, by this thematic and linguistic exploration of corporeal relationships, Merleau-Ponty realises this language in a way that it is not realised in
Heidegger.
Negativity therefore assumes for Merleau-Ponty the function of corporeal positivity, a palpability and presence that is both undeniable and irreducible, linking us to the transcendence of lived life, yet irreducible to the characteristics of that life. The study of nature performs a vital function here because it ties Merleau-Ponty’s discourse to the physical characteristics of organisms as expressions of life. By contrast, Heidegger’s negativity, in continuing to be oriented via Being, not beings, remains essentially abyssal.
Merleau-Ponty avoids this kind of regress by a mutual discourse of presence and absence: this coming together of the empirical and transcendental that is articulated in the physicality of the organism, but, again, not reducible to such physicality. A central component of this position is the innate expressivity of life as the expression of physical being. A form of materiality instigates and continually grounds the cultural regime of language and provides a model whereby negativity is manifest within concrete phenomena. Where Heidegger definitively excludes such an approach, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that a discourse of beings need not be limited to beings, and it might be a pathway towards a genuine ontology; that it might, in fact, be the only valid pathway.
244
` La chair est triste, hélas ! et j’ai lu tous les livres.
Stéphane Mallarmé
245 246 7
The Poetic
Confluence of Word and Flesh
The Romantics sought to ground philosophy within the artwork, within literature, recognising in the act of sensory presentation, Darstellung, the possibility for the work to articulate its own ground and avoid the regress of ‘re-presentation.’ Heidegger too finds salvation in the poets, but although he shares the Romantic elevation of linguistic negativity and emphasises the indirectly disclosive faculties of poetry, he does not offer a discourse of the sensory, poetic or otherwise. Indeed, Heidegger shies away from any such analysis, identifying it with a ‘language of metaphysics’ he is eager to discard. By contrast, the sensory characteristics of expression assume a central position in Merleau-
Ponty’s work, yet he does not widely explore poetry as a specific literary genre.75
Merleau-Ponty’s consistent centring of discussion within corporeality puts him in closer proximity to a Romantic model of sensory ‘presentation’ than Heidegger, and it is this sensory, material, 76 dimension of Merleau-Ponty’s work, especially concerning the issue of language, that will be the focus of this chapter. It is particularly within poetry that the junction of language’s material and conceptual dimensions is most apparent, and From Page 245. “The flesh is sad, alas! and I’ve read all the books.” ‘Brise Marine’ in Mallarmé, 1945. 38. 75 The Notes de cours do contain some discussion of Rimbaud and Valéry, as well as Proust, Claudel, Flaubert and other prose writers. Notes de cours 1959-1961. Gallimard, Mayen, 1996. See particularlly 46- 8, 175, 183-7. Also, there is some discussion of literature in the Phenomenology. See, for example, the discussion of Proust, PhP, 212. 76 This is not the place to enter into a discussion of the various forms of materialism: the intention here is to extend Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the interlinking of the material and immaterial dimensions of existence into the discussion of language and poetry. When I write of “Merleau-Ponty’s materialism,” or of the “material/ist dimension” of his work, the intention is not to reduce his work to a form of materialism, but to highlight this interlinking and interdependence. 247 the final section will concentrate on the way in which different forms of materiality and absence define the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. Mallarmé, then, that most complex and cerebral of poets, will offer a poetic model for this intersection of poetry with philosophy, in particular as it concerns the immediate question of language as an interplay of sense-making and sensation.
The argument offered here will be that language remains grounded in corporeality not only in terms of the ‘originating gesture’ explored in Chapter 5, or of the ‘grounding of meaning within the lived body’ discussed in Chapter 6, but through the coaction of its conceptualising schema and the material characteristics of words. The relationship between the embodied dimension of language and the word’s explicit referential function will be addressed most explicitly through the phonemic qualities of expression and their poetic and philosophical implications.
The gulf which separates Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty finds definitive form in their approach to the sensory and material dimensions of existence, including the way these elements are understood in relation to language. Merleau-Ponty locates expression within life, not as an abstract ontological category, but as a grounding in the concrete, physical attributes of living things. Although the relation between corporeality and poetry is in some respects an obvious one, Heidegger, despite being one of the 20 th Century’s most significant ‘poetic philosophers,’ 77 shows no interest in positioning language in this way.
These differing approaches to expression demonstrate different pathways to ontology: for
Heidegger, the movement into Being excludes a discourse of beings, where Merleau-
Ponty’s pathway is consciously one of “ being in the beings .” 78
What remains central in Merleau-Ponty’s dialectic of material/immaterial is the necessary interdependence of these two elements of existence. For Merleau-Ponty there 77 The two principle significations of this phrase are, I think, equally valid. 78 VI, 179. My emphasis. 248 is no way into Being that is not via beings. Within a Merleau-Pontian model, therefore, a discourse of poetry (as a ‘Heideggerian ontological cornerstone’ or otherwise) that ignores the ontic components of language prevents us from understanding essential qualities of linguistic origin and revelation, and occludes our way into ontology. Another way to put this, is that part of what Heidegger refers to as the ‘vibration of poetic saying’ only exists through a sensory component of language—that the poem’s resistance to logico-discursive ‘translation’ is, in part, a sensory resistance , which arises from the interplay of language’s material and conceptual dimensions.
This idea finds its most concrete realisation in Merleau-Ponty through his tracing of the material dimensions of expression back to the phonemes which construct our words.
In the Prose of the World he writes:
The syllables and letters, the turns of phrase, and the word endings are the sediments of a
primary differentiation which, this time, precedes without any doubt the relation of sign
to signification, since it is what makes the very distinction between signs possible. 79
Language begins in this original gesture of differentiation. Speech sounds are thus seen as indications of the divergence of one thing from another: bringing out the verbal idea like a figure from a background. It is phonemes which make the distinction between each linguistic sign possible.
Phonemes, then, are the real “foundation of speech,” yet despite this, they have no place in any semantic or grammatical analysis – by themselves they “ mean nothing that one can specify.” But it is this very absence of determinate meaning which for Merleau-
Ponty indicates their originary place in signification: that they bring to us the presence of
79 PW, 32. My emphasis . 249 the “primary operation, beneath institutionalized language” 80 which creates the possibility of signification and of signs themselves. In order to consider such sound as foundational, for Merleau-Ponty its absence of determinate meaning is a prerequisite: for the phoneme to signify its sense must first be open – a kind of semi-blank slate upon which meaning might subsequently be written.
Yet phonemes do not mean nothing—they mean nothing that one can specify. Such sounds are expressive , yet their meaning is prior to referential signification. The sub- meanings of phonemes, these “sediments of a primary differentiation,” indicate a meaning, then, not of a specific signified, but of a variance of things, a meaning that is endlessly bound to the sensory, experiential dimension of lived life.
Thinking of the poem as a ‘singing of world,’ we might say that such sounds come from the world and carry the world with them. One lesson of the poem, then, is that phonemes have full expressivity, that one layer of the poem’s meaning arrives within them, yet that such meaning has little, if any, conceptually resolvable content. Further, the meaning of the sound-shape of a poem is inextricable from that which is conceptually resolvable. This ‘poetic materialism’ directs us to a continual yet fundamentally irresolvable exchange between the corporeal and the conceptual.
If we extend meaning beyond that which can be semantically determined, however, where does linguistic meaning begin and end, both in terms of the enriched sonic landscape of the poem and language in general? At what point does meaning enter the word, and how are we to establish the movement of sense, from sound into
‘comprehensible utterance’? Merleau-Ponty locates meaning within a series of expansive and layered significative structures, extending from these sensory phonemic
80 ibid., 33. 250 engagements of “primary differentiation ” into the semantically determined conceptual web that language is usually understood to be composed of.
This Merleau-Pontian poetic is confirmed by our experience of the poem, which functions through a semantically open, materially determined signification, in which sound-shapes, rhyme, rhythm and a host of other ‘musical’ components combine in order to produce an overall ‘meaning-effect.’ Such a ‘meaning-effect’ is explained through this phonemic materialist anatomy as a literal, which is to say, in this case, sensory,
‘evocation of world.’ Poetry proposes a linguistic and extra-linguistic soundtrack of existence, in which boundaries between the two (linguistic and extra-linguistic) blur and disappear. Charles Bernstein, in his poetic essay ‘Artifice of Absorption,’ writes:
. . . there is no fixed
threshold at which noise becomes phonically
significant; the further back this threshold is
pushed, the greater the resonance at the cutting
edge. The semantic strata of a poem should not be
understood as only those elements to which a
relative fixed connotative or denotative meaning
can be ascribed, for this would restrict meaning to
the exclusively recuperable elements of language—a
restriction that literally applied would make
meaning impossible. 81
These questions of sound and sense are at the forefront of the poem, which pushes this
‘semantic line,’ this threshold, deliberately. The poem wants to ask at what point meaning appears out of ‘raw sonic matter’—indeed, if ‘sonic matter’ can ever, in this
81 Charles Bernstein, A Poetics. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1992. 12-3. 251 formulation, be thought of as ‘raw.’ In Bernstein’s argument, the breakdown of semantic sense present in the ‘pushing back of the threshold’ is an opening upon a kind of
‘resonant’ sense. The poem illustrates to us the sonic organism of words: it is a holistic thing which ‘lives’ within a meaning that is ‘of the word’ as both within and beyond any determinable sense. The poem, then, is an open space of sense-giving resonance, rising from the intermingling of concept and sound which effaces any clear point of demarcation between the two.
Although this threshold is at the forefront in poetry, it is present in all utterance. In
Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language , for instance, Merleau-Ponty offers a brief analysis of the tonal and musical qualities of language as a primordial meaning that dwells in language’s sound-shape and song. In tracing the emergence of language in the child, its commencement with incoherent babbling and transformation into explicit meaning structures, this primitive, phonemic aspect of meaning is seen to remain present in all language as an ‘affective tonality,’ and conveys “a level of meaning in speech which is more fundamental and more primitive than that of translatable, conceptual thought.” 82
It is unlikely Bernstein would be very comfortable with the primordial reach in
Merleau-Ponty’s statement, although they demonstrate corresponding ideas: the resonance of the sonic-semantic threshold and the way in which it problematises and expands our sense of ‘origin’ in meaning. This resonance is precisely the interplay of material sound and semantic structure.
Sound, then, conveys a certain affect, a bringing into being of phonic characteristics that enact the existential ‘song’ which is the ‘soundtrack’ of our immersion in a world of noise and silence. This is not to argue for a ‘pure language of things,’ beyond or beneath 82 James M. Edie, ‘Foreword’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language , trans. Hugh J. Silverman. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. xviii. 252 existing language – a possibility which Merleau-Ponty explicitly rejects. 83 Rather, what is exposed here is the chiasmic relationship between speech sounds and meaning, between the body, the world, and the historico-conceptual specificity of expression. This phonemic element of meaning links language to the flesh in concrete terms, and thus poetry can be thought of as the supreme linguistic enaction of the flesh.
In this way, the pre-linguistic is located within the chiasm of lived experience as a corporeal characteristic rather than as an abstract attribute, with its corporeality granting it a concreteness even within its irresolution. In a rare reference to poetry, Merleau-Ponty comments of Arthur Rimbaud:
Rimbaud surpassed the correlation of sign and signification not by moving away from the
positivity of the world, but on the contrary by entering without reserve into its pre-logical
unity, by revealing its connections and its brute resonances 84
Rimbaud’s entry into the pre-logical unity of the world, Merleau-Ponty goes on to say, is through the transference of one word’s meaning to another by Rimbaud’s
‘methodological derangement of the senses.’ Interestingly, in the compacted form of these notes, this ‘derangement,’ made famous in Rimbaud’s letters of the
‘Seer’/‘ Voyant,’ 85 is offered in such a way that it might refer equally to the derangement of the ‘sense’ of words as of Rimbaud’s senses. Language and poet thus both appear to gain a proximity to experience.
This “pre-logical unity” is a classically Merleau-Pontian line, but we can see how it gains a more tangible quality within this discourse of sonic materiality. 83 ibid., xxvii. 84 Rimbaud: dépasse la corrélation signe-signification non en se détournant de [la] positivité du monde, mais ou contraire en entrant sans réserve dans son unité prélogique, en réveillant ses connexions et ses résonances sauvages. Merleau-Ponty, 1996. 47. 85 Rimbaud two letters ‘du Voyant,’ to Georges Izambard and Paul Demeny, were both written in 1871. 253 Poetry enters into and enacts these chiasmic pre-linguistic relationships. The sign is characterised by both the material and conceptual: for language, this is the meaning of the chiasm and both elements gain visibility within a semantic derangement. The poem, that is, stresses the material dimension of language within the negativity of strategic syntactic disruption: the failure of explicit meanings within the sign making apparent its other dimensions. Brought to the fore are sound-shapes and musicality, the presence of words as themselves collections of symbols, letters arranged to form words’ ‘greater symbols.’
Yet to enter this poetic intersection of the conceptual and material signifier is to arrive at a paradox. The poet, in part, wants words to sing, to resonate purely as sound – raw matter – a ‘world-sound’ devoid of symbol. The poem, however, is made of meanings and a word is always a sign, always pointing beyond its explicit presence. This pointing beyond, this paradox of concept and material thing, is the poem. The assumption of meaning rests behind every utterance and the song-like qualities of the poem never entirely efface the word’s need to signify. Henri Maldiney writes:
The articulation of sound and sense is the auto-creative act of spoken language. However,
their articulation in poetry is of a completely different kind. . . . Even if the effect of the
meaning in a poem differs from the intentional signification in a discursive expression, this
does not mean that poetry should be reduced to nothing more than a musical emission of
articulated sound. 86
86 “L’articulation du son et du sens est l’acte auto-créateur du langage parlé. Mais leur articulation en poésie est incomparable à toute autre. . . . Si l’effet de sens d’un poème diffère de la signification intentionnelle d’une expression en forme de discours, la poésie ne se réduit pas pour autant à une émission musicale de sons articulés.” Henri Maldiney L’art, l’éclair de l’être. Chambéry, Éditions Comp’Act, La Polygraphe, 2003. 120. 254 Maldiney’s comments demonstrate the depth of intertwining between the symbolic and non-symbolic. Even with the ‘auto-creative’ poetic act, which arrives at the conjunction of sound and sense, material and conceptual, the word cannot help but ‘mean.’ No matter to what degree meaning is effaced, to what extent the word’s material origins are foregrounded, structures of meaning are engaged: the word is never ‘mere’ sound. Yet whatever meaning does emerge, just as it engages established, definitive and explicit word-meanings, it also reaches beyond them. Although the poem always carries a meaning and might never be reduced to a ‘musical emission of articulated sound,’ within this material/conceptual interplay it speaks beyond definitively established structures.
In this way, the artist or poet recreates a moment of meaning’s ‘coming into presence’ through the relationship between varying forms of poetic ‘severance’ and the word’s irrepressible impulse towards signification. “The artist begins in nothing,” 87 Maldiney writes: art’s role here is the presentation of this void, the act of bringing meaning out of the void, out of the ontic horizon of existence and out of the negative ground of Being.
To recreate a moment of emergence, in this sense, is to allow the word to speak of that which is outside significative structures. The artist’s work is to “tear open” the void and for Maldiney such an act is the sole way by which Being is illuminated:88 an act that reaches into the unformed magma of meaning, into the pre-linguistic, to engage in an act of meaning creation. Art here is the ‘lightning-flash’ of Being—not only an act of revelation, but of brilliance, an Augenblick that reveals in a vibrant instant what is otherwise hidden.
Here, says Maldiney, is the poem—an unresolved glimmer of what is beyond, and within, established communicative structures, a rift in the fabric of meaning rising from broken linguistic arrangements and the poem’s need to signify. Through this rift we see 87 “L’artiste commence par le rien” Henri Maldiney, Art et existence. Paris, Klincksieck, 2003. 119. 88 “La déchirure du rien : unique éclair de l’être.” ibid., 18. 255 the shimmer of possibility, the trace of an impossible whole gone bright within the void.
It is here, paradoxically in the word’s most ethereal aspect, that the relationship between language as material and language as idea becomes most apparent. This is where the poem comes into its own, as a conduit between spoken and unspoken, speakable and unspeakable, presence and void.
Image, metaphor, assonance, dissonance, enjambment, rhythm, rhyme, half-rhyme and paradox: these and a host of other tropes and techniques are used to subvert, break down or transform the threads of language, to force them to reveal their edges, their roots, their physicality and where that physicality ends. One of the principal lessons of the poem is this interrelation of the physical and ideational, for all of these tropes deal in one way or another with the material aspect of language, and the way the immateriality of the idea – our capacity for image and sense making – draws on the materiality of the world. They deal with meaning as an intersection, as a textual opening; they play with the uncertain border between phoneme and meaningful utterance. Valéry, the most reflective of the great modernist French poets, who was an embodiment of the Romantic unification of theory and practice, writes:
Poetry must extend over the whole being; it stimulates the muscular organization by its
rhythms, it frees or unleashes the verbal facilities, ennobling their whole action, it regulates
our depths, for poetry aims to arouse or reproduce the unity and harmony of the living
person, an extraordinary unity that shows itself when a man is possessed by an intense
feeling that leaves none of his powers disengaged. 89
89 Paul Valéry, The Art of Poetry, in Gerald L. Bruns Modern Poetry and the Idea of Language . Illinois, Dalkey Archive Press, 2001. 93. 256 For Valéry, the poem engages the living being in all its dimensions: muscular, active, verbal; it speaks through the body to the depths of one’s being. The poem demonstrates, then, that any absolute separation of language from the world is impossible: we learn the conceptual dimension of language within our construction of sound-shapes, our engagement with things, and the material and conceptual remain interlinked.
For at what point can we imagine that this commingling ends? Words are more than symbols—their presence is real: a vibration in the air, ink upon a page, or even an image within the mind. Language carries the world’s tactility within it. It is here that the
Merleau-Pontian principle of the flesh defines such a central ground. The tactility of sound itself bears qualities of the world. The poem’s interest in the relationship between
‘sound and sense’ is based in this interrelation of the physical properties of language and of things, in the possibility that different forms of utterance might in some way address this relationship more completely.
What do we learn from the interplay between poetic cadence and concept, from the relationship between a fluctuating harmonics and how it reacts with a part-broken semantic field, but that words speak a kind of flesh ? The inexorable articulable front of signification is not our only point of meaningful contact with utterance; it is just the most apparent and persistent.
The “hesitation between sound and sense,” as Valéry famously describes the poem, is thus seen to operate partly within a space of (auditory) corporeal pre-meaning, the point at which sound and meaning interact to present an element of the world. Sound dwells not only within the institution of language, but within our lives and their place in an auditory horizon: the sound of rain as it beats on tin; of cicadas trilling; of cars on wet bitumen and the clatter of a passing train; the ceaseless hum of the city and the creaking silence of the bush. Such sounds join the semantically resolvable utterances that we
257 discover within the poem, blending linguistic and pre-linguistic within a configuration of words.
These noises and all others comprise the poet’s palette, and with them he or she must mould the world into new form, must represent colour, odour and shape, fear and joy, possible and impossible. In the midst of this sonic landscape, amongst it as a layer of leaves cloaks the surface of a pool, mapping it and moving with it, both on the surface and below, is language itself. Here are words both ancient and modern, words that reinvent themselves with each utterance, which might be laid down in direct acts of signification, or bent and subverted, which might bring us back to this auditory field or take us into a circle of word amidst word.
The symbolic realm is infused with the non-symbolic.
The symbol never stands alone, but is inseparable from the web that it is drawn from, and of which it remains a part. The illusion of language is that this separation appears complete, yet the experiential dimension of communication remains implicit within the word, within the phonemes that construct our speech, within the material presence of the world’s song that resonates in every utterance.
The corporeal nature of sound is central to our experience of expression. We are first united with the language of others at a basic bodily level—the sound of a word forces its way into the ear as resonance and vibration. It is only after the word has engaged us in this way – that is, physically – that we gain an opening upon the conceptual meanings that its sound-shape has acquired. Yet in what way can we talk about meaning as it exists within the phonemic qualities of sound, within the word’s music? Such meaning is generally discussed as ‘non-referential,’ which is an accurate enough description if
258 considered as a relation of musicality and word-meaning. Yet such meaning, being caught in the greater relationship between language and world, refers to something , even if that something is only the contextual relationships within which language is formed.
In the concrete sense of phonemes, then, the flesh of language begins in the flesh of sound. We might think about the way we interact with the word ‘stop,’ our aspiration of its consonants, the sibilance of the ‘s,’ followed by the sharpness of the ‘t,’ the open, somewhat ‘surprised’ quality of the ‘o’ that is abruptly cut short in a ‘bilabial’ plosive closure with the utterance of the ‘p.’ The sonic characteristics of the word’s sound-shape form a complex relationship with its meaning, which continually informs and orients greater communicative structures: the overlay between phoneme and semantics which, although not offering a determinable configuration of signification, remains of prime importance in the act of signification.
Such complex relationships of sens/ation are highlighted when we consider onomatopoeic words such as ‘hiss,’ ‘fizzle’ or ‘whack.’ Consider ‘Whack,’ for instance: the building volume of the ‘w(h)’ leading to the closed-throated rush of air in the ‘a’ and finishing with the sharp ‘velar’ plosive of tongue against hard palate, a rush of breath modelling the moment of impact. In this example we can almost feel the word come into being each time we use it, feel our breathing become expression. Although it needs to be emphasised that this is not intended to proclaim an onomatopoeic relationship between sound and meaning, considering the word in this way does demonstrate a link between the existential and corporeal inception of meaning and the corporeality of the word.
‘Whack’ shows us a point of emergence, one layer of the birth of meaning, a trace of which remains present within utterance.
259 Language is founded within the active, lived body, and such phonemic analysis makes this apparent. For Merleau-Ponty, this indicates a diacritics that exists not only within the semantic system, but within the building blocks of language itself. All linguistic meaning is built on the same interaction that forms spoken language: a conversation between self and world.
We are caught up in language and it in us: it is a flesh both of our thought and of our bodily bound expressivity. Here, linguistic expression as flesh intersects closely with what Merleau-Ponty seeks for the concept more generally: immanent and transcendent, corporeal and mental, cultural and ‘natural,’ palpable and ‘trace.’ Language arrives within abstract ideation and corporeal body, and continues to engage them both. It is this inextricability that is emphasised by the poem.
We recognise in the flesh the birth of meaning as our own relentless perceptual rebirth.
To say, then, that the flesh births language, points us not only in the direction of our own embodied states, but to the ‘body’ of language : the body of the word as a sound-shape, as a thing that acts upon the ear. The word does not land within us as an idea: first we literally sense its vibration. What we are pushed up against is a certain vibratory lightness or fullness, a resonant air which carries a music or tonality that itself intersects with our bodies. Within everyday communication, however, this relationship disappears – ‘the meaning swallows up the sign’ and we are frequently conscious of the act of meaning alone. And yet, this corporeality retains a presence within meaning, even should it not be apparent. That is, as Merleau-Ponty writes, that language is founded upon an intersection
– upon an echo of carnality between our (literal) flesh, and the flesh of the word, which is this sound, upon the “action of like upon like (the warm sun makes me warm ), on the fusion of me embodied—and the world.” 90
90 PW, 20. 260 All of this is to say what Heidegger seems unwilling to acknowledge: that language is necessarily sensory; that it always links with an ontic dimension of our lives. Not only is meaning grounded within the body, but the speech sounds from which it is ultimately constructed are a response to our bodily situatedness. The materiality of language is our materiality. We roll words around the tongue, wrestle with them and feel within each a certain weight and density.
Further, concepts themselves remain grounded in perception and are never entirely freed from the flesh. Meaning is founded within a perceptual world that remains the ground of signification, and within the movement from the perceived to the ideal. The concept’s detachment from the flesh of things leaves it wrapped in another flesh – that of words. Even ideas retain a certain carnality. 91
The idea is entwined in the totality of what is said, not only inasmuch as language is seen as a unity of meanings, a system whereby a series of significations draws something from the whole, but rather that the meaning, in a sense, is the word; the body of the word as sound-shape and song. The “meaning is not on the phrase like butter on the bread, like a second layer of “psychic reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said
. . . given with the words for those who have ears to hear.” 92
It is possible that there is no space in Heidegger’s methodology for the kind of corporeal emphasis that is central in a discussion of linguistic materiality, that his way into Being cannot be articulated with a discourse of beings. The voice of language for
Heidegger, that is, must always encompass a silence: not a Merleau-Pontian silence as
‘fecund meaning,’ an innate expressivity of world as itself a silent meaning structure.
Rather it is the abyssal silence of ein nichtiges Nichts .
91 VI, 155. See also Dillon, 1997. 217. 92 VI, 155. 261 For both philosophers, language articulates a transcendence, but between Merleau-
Ponty and Heidegger, transcendence names a very different beyond. For Heidegger, we are located within the ontological abyss of the nothing. But for Merleau-Ponty it is the transcendence of a world that is overflowing with meaning, feeding the transcendent fullness of a language that surpasses the explicit front of its own significations . Although
Heidegger’s nothing does contain the kind of expressive fullness that is recalled by an intersection with Asian thought – that “nothing is not nothing, but a kind of fullness” – this is never concretely realised, for his ontocentric discourse sets its gaze too firmly beyond ‘presence.’
Merleau-Ponty’s lesson is that transcendence dwells within such presence. The invisible is always present within the visible; the transcendent of language is present within its auditory horizon—there is no pathway to Being except that of beings, it is only that the former cannot be reduced to that of the latter.
Language always contains its material dimension, both as a trace of linguistic origin within the corporeal self and a universe of physical structures and things, and as a constant point of intersection between the subject and the word. The phonemes, sound- shapes and moments of a-conceptual song from which an utterance is woven indicate a materiality that goes to the primordial origins of expression. The phonemic qualities of the word demonstrate a chiasm, an intersection of common origin. They enact— physically, literally, conceptually—the flesh itself; they demonstrate our meeting with the world.
Language is continually oriented in Heidegger by an imperative of ontological negativity, where for Merleau-Ponty our ontological opening is chiasmic. Beyond language itself, this further demonstrates the substantial difference between their conceptions of negativity. Contra Heidegger, “Merleau-Ponty arrives at a productive
262 definition of negativity because he links it directly to a conception of life.” 93 Life may well be irreducible and transcendent, but it is always expressive, and in Merleau-Ponty, the innate transcendence of life is there within expression as the excess of meaning within signification. Although its transcendence may necessitate a language of negativity, its meaning structure remains both positive and productive.
93 Deranty, 2008. 178. 263 Between Flesh and Abyss—
A Case Study in Stéphane Mallarmé
For Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the function of poetic language is not to conceptualise or describe experience, but to allow some form of primary relationship to emerge within the ‘vibration of poetic saying.’ Between the two, however, the path of such a primordial experience is conceived entirely differently. The following analysis of
Mallarmé’s work will poeticise this difference, offering a poetic model by which this language-world-experience nexus is conveyed through creative practice.
Although Mallarmé’s work is defined by an expressive negativity, as with Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the goal and origin of such negativity might be seen to produce very different emphases. I will offer two distinct readings of Mallarmé: one will locate his poetics via the linguistic and metaphysical abyss through which it is frequently read; the other will argue for a materialist reading in the vein of that which is offered in the first section of this chapter. I will claim, however, that although it is ultimately between these two poles that we are positioned through Mallarmé’s poems, the abyss is in some respects self-negating: that within its opening it illustrates an essential quality of language, something that, in their different ways, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both stress.
This might be understood in terms of the paradoxical necessity of linguistic failure that has emerged in previous chapters. In Mallarmé, this is most apparent in the way that a materiality of signification arises directly from a semantic abyss, and so doing makes apparent the inexorability of meaning as an existential relation between subject, language and world. As we shall see, this quality of expression takes the implications of our discussion beyond the ‘mere’ aesthetic implications of poetics, and into broader questions of meaning and truth. 264
For Mallarmé, meaning emerges out of the chaos of the world, from absence and void.
Yet this is not to say that meaning itself is necessarily abyssal. Rather, like Merleau-
Ponty, Mallarmé’s poetics can be seen to offer signification as an emergence from a chaotic yet meaning-rich speech of things—from divergence and negativity; like
Merleau-Ponty, a linguistic proximity to the world can only be articulated by the
‘plunging’ of syntactic originality, by a movement away from “the eloquent language” in order to escape a world “reduced to our idealisations and syntax.”94 Like Merleau-Ponty, that is, the attempt to articulate a ‘pure’ language is accompanied by a movement away from established pathways of sense.
Poetry articulates the moment of perceptual experience via an interplay of non- symbolic sound-scape and symbolic structure. This relationship, between language as symbol and language as corporeal utterance, is the centre of the poetic act. The constant sidestepping of pre-established semantic pathways, the subversion of meaning, is conjoined with the act of poetic musicality. The intimacy of this relationship is central to
Mallarmé’s linguistic transformation, to the poem’s articulation of that which is beyond the explicit boundaries of utterance: for language to articulate non-language significations it must open the ground between silence and speech. Mallarmé makes this
‘ground’ his own.
In writing that “the main thing [in the poem] is to oppose thought, to arouse resistance to it,” 95 it is to this space ‘between’ that Valéry draws our attention. Valéry’s debt to
Mallarmé weighs heavily within this statement and it would seem that he has a decidedly non-Heideggerian model of ‘thought’ in mind: that the poem’s opposition is to thought as
94 VI, 102. 95 Bruns, 2001. 91. 265 a form of logical deduction, rather than thought as a Heideggerian ‘poeticising,’ which can be seen to encompass a similar resistance.
Sigurd Burckhardt offers a material metaphor for why such resistance is necessary: as an artist who ‘sculpts’ material that is already meaningful, in order to approach the position of other artists, whose medium is devoid of significance other than what is
‘moulded’ into it, the poet’s use of “poetic devices—especially rhyme, meter, and metaphor—is to release words in some measure from their bondage to meaning, their purely referential role, and to give or restore to them the corporeality which a true medium needs.” 96 With this in mind, Mallarmé, that most cerebral of poets, can be read as a sculptor of sound, showing us that language is more than an accumulation of concepts, but is alive, is a kind of flesh. It is the act of sculpting that especially makes this flesh apparent to us.
Stripping words of their significative function in order to ‘sculpt’ that which is beyond or behind linguistic structures was the Mallarméan problem par excellence. Mallarmé, literally, made an art form of expressive negativity, assigning language the primary function of “referring by absence to what it signifies.” 97 Expressing an idea that, at least initially, strikes us as strange, we are told such negativity aims towards a purity of expression; the function of his compressed, abyssal poems was thus, as Mallarmé wrote in ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe,’ to “Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.” 98 Such purity is highlighted via the two understandings of sens : that poetry gives both a purer meaning to language and that the ‘sens(ation)’ that accompanies words is purified within this ‘semantic fire’: that poetry might be said to give a ‘purer feel’ to language. The
96 Sigurd Burckhardt, ‘The Poet as Fool and Priest’ in ELH, Vol. 23, No.4. December, 1959. 280. 97 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Myth of Mallarme’ in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1995. 32. 98 “Give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe.” Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Le Tombeau D’Edgar Poe’ in Oeuvres Complètes . Pléiade, Gallimard, 1945. 189. 266 varying significations of this phrase each point to a linguistic primordiality. This slippage between different senses of ‘sense’ suggests a Merleau-Pontian conception of meaning, in which language is understood in terms of the interwoven connections between phenomenological experience and symbolic sense-making: the oscillation between different ‘senses’ of the wor(l)d.99
The point of such rejuvenation is to bring us closer to language’s origin, to the thing behind the word. The paradox is that it is an abyss which enacts this rejuvenation, opening up our ‘proximity to origins’ through the severance of meaning pathways.
This Mallarméan chasm is central in his great work, Un coup de dés (A Throw of the
Dice ),100 a poem that opens abyss after abyss on pages dominated by blank space, the page’s own white void. A central motif running through the work reads “UN COUP DE
DÉS . . . JAMAIS . . . N’ABOLIRA . . . LE HASARD. [A THROW OF THE DICE
/WILL NEVER [EVER] ...ABOLISH ... CHANCE].” 101 Mallarmé was radically oriented via negativity at the time he wrote Un coup de dés , and was deeply engaged with the poem on a theoretical, as well as a creative, level. Regarding poetic ‘construction,’ he writes:
Everything will be hesitation, disposition of parts, their alterations and relationships—all
contributing to the rhythmic totality, which will be the very silence of the poem, in its
blank spaces, as that silence is translated by each structural element in its own way. 102
99 It is perhaps Jean-Luc Nancy who most explicitly exploits this particular interplay. See The Sense of the World , trans. Jeffrey S. Librett. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 100 Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems , trans. Henry Weinfield. Berkley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1994. 124. 101 ibid., 124-7. 132-3, 140-1. 102 Mallarmé, 1945. 367. This translation from Bruns, 2001. 112. 267 What becomes apparent is not only that the poem’s literary metaphors are to be understood as in some way determined by its other elements, but, and this follows by implication, the space, grammar and other textual features gain a metaphorical meaning of their own. The polysemy of the French ‘JAMAIS,’ translating as both ‘never’ and
‘ever,’ opens the poem with an emphatic double entendre. Further, what is translated in
English as throw, or toss, in French suggests more concrete possibilities, with ‘COUP’ taken individually finding direct translation as ‘blow’ or ‘knock,’ proposing another possible reading as ‘a blow of the dice will always abolish chance.’
The poem’s central motif of chance and abyss is thus unified by typography and woven through the text, so an array of possible readings are separated through the pages by geometric and typographic arrangement. Robert Cohen argues the poem to be constructed with all the exactitude of a mathematical theorem, and offers an ‘orphic’ story of creation within its structure. 103 Mallarmé’s poem thus enacts a precise break with established meaning as a creation of new meaning. Notes reveal a mathematical concern with the dimensions of the text, its typography and spacing.104 The ‘break’ with the literal offers a new language in which all the poem’s facets form a greater symbolic communication. Following Mallarmé, other poets emphasise the geometrical aspects of their own work, yet Mallarmé offers a precision to the work’s non-linguistic elements, revealing an extra-linguistic, yet textually based, communication, which, at least in the mind of the poet, is no less precise than the semantic meaning that he both plays with and undermines.
Meaning is thus multiplied and remultiplied – metaphorically, mythologically, structurally – yet continually grounded by this contradictory central melody. With 103 Robert Greer Cohen, Mallarmé’s Un Coup de Dés: an exegesis. New York, AMS Press, 1980. 9. 104 For a detailed exploration of ‘space’ and ‘arrangement in Mallarme see: Virginia A. la Charité, The Dynamics of Space : Mallarmé’s Un Coup des dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard . Lexington, French Forum, 1987. 268 spacing and typography playing such a significant part in the determination of meaning, the metaphoric reading of the poem’s title must be brought into relation to a web of interconnecting semantic, semiotic, typographic and visual factors, each one of which will ‘colour’ the interpretation of this central image.
A meaning structure emerges that is both fragmented and holistic, with each word
‘liberated’ from its usual paths of signification, yet set within an expanded form- determined meaning ‘constellation.’ We see this in the poem’s final movement, which gestures metaphorically towards the self-reflexive nature of Mallarmé’s poetics.
EXCEPT
on high
PERHAPS
. . .
toward
what must be
the Septentrion as well as North
A CONSTELLATION
cold from forgetfulness and desuetude
not so much
that it doesn’t number
on some vacant and superior surface
the successive shock
in the way of stars
of a total account in the making
keeping vigil
269 doubting
rolling
shining and meditating
before coming to a halt
at some terminus that sanctifies it
All Thought emits a Throw of the Dice 105
The scatter of the poem’s words across the page, besides the altering of emphasis produced by the enjambment and effects on rhythm and cadence, is such a constellation: a laying out, a dispersal—sparks of meaning, fragments of thought. Poems themselves throw the dice of meaning, revealing the nature of the dice as they do so.
This ‘constellation effect’ offers one articulation of a Mallarméan linguistic abyss. The textual constellation is emphasised by the variation in font sizing, which, like a map of stars, offers the reader multiple possibilities of syntactic connection. Septentrion, the constellation of the Great Bear, is a mythical interpretive map thrown over the sky. Its appearance here can be read as a comparison between the ‘game’ of meaning and a semi- arbitrary assigning of meanings to specks amidst the infinite: the constellation appears to order a chaos of sky, when in reality it creates its own arbitrary ‘idea of order.’ In fact, the patterns themselves only appear for us: the illusion of a two dimensional surface from the narrow outlook of earth. Septentrion can thus be read in terms of an abyssal positioning of linguistic structure—that we assign these arbitrary names to phenomena from which we are ever distant; that an endless distance exists between the word and that which it names. 105 Mallarmé, 1994. 144. 270 The act of meaning’s formation is then a complex process of “rolling” and “doubting,” essentially random and chaotic, that comes to a halt “at some terminus that sanctifies it.”
The use of the word ‘some’ here underscores an arbitrariness in how we ‘arrive’ at meaning: that there are multiple points at which meaning might pause, might resolve, multiple pathways for us to follow; that we arrive not at the meaning, but at some meaning. If all thought emits a throw of the dice it is an engagement with both known and void, but the end result, the destination, is essentially arbitrary. All expression likewise plays at the limits of meaning. The poem, as itself a ‘throw,’ offers then “the successive shock” of an “account of the making,” and is made and remade with each successive reading. Here, between pinpricks of meaning in the frozen emptiness of space, language is a void.
It is within the work of Paul Valéry that we gain the most uncompromisingly abyssal reading of Mallarmé. Valéry, who was likely the first person to read Un coup de dés beside its author, would later write of the experience: “Here, in truth, infinity spoke, thought and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectation, doubt and concentration were visible things. My comprehension had to cope with embodied silences.” 106 Embodied silences, wonderfully contradictory on multiple levels, offer something of a visible framework to Mallarméan negativity, connecting linguistic silences with the visual organisation of the text.
Yet we must not misread Valéry’s intent: this is not a ‘material’ silence, ringing with the absence of a fullness to come; the silence that is within language as meaning bursting forth. Rather, it is the silence of negation, a silence that recalls Heideggerian Dasein, cast into an abyssal state of existence, defined at each step by absence and lack. Beyond this ontic interpretation, however, we are also taken in the direction of ein nichtiges Nichts .
106 Paul Valéry, Selected Writings of Paul Valéry. New York, New Directions, 1964. 218. 271 We have been here before: expressive negativity echoes the negative ground of Being.
The poem demonstrates an ontological and ontic void, the endless emptiness on which existence rests.
The necessity of indeterminacy and paradox in language locates us within the indeterminacy and paradox of life. The experience of reading Un coup de dés , and his friendship with Mallarmé in general, would prove to have a profound effect on Valéry, who would go on to take up the challenge of Un coup de dés directly: how can something as warped, messy and self-contradictory as language offer us necessity and meaning?
As a response Valéry gives up poetry altogether in 1892, 107 convinced that science and mathematics exhausted the possibilities of linguistic connection (between the subject and the world). It is particularly the central figure from Monsieur Teste 108 who characterises this attitude, and period, for Valéry. Teste is removed and disassociated from his environment to an impossible extent, a figure of pure intellect who serves essentially as a witness to the processes of the mind: a “subjective interiority detached from any particular subject.” 109
For all his detachment, however, Teste represents something of a crisis—Valéry’s own crise de vers : the belief that poetry is nothing more than a naïve game when compared to the rigour of thought, the avowal that science is the only real mark of knowledge. It takes twenty years, but Valéry’s ultimate response is an emphatic return to poetry, a realisation that the poet does indeed offer what the discourses of science and mathematics cannot.
Yet the aesthetic, the poetic, remain for him a ‘void’ of consciousness, and beauty is
107 Rémy G. Saisselin, ‘Paul Valéry: The Aesthetics of the Grand Seigneur’ in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Vol. 19, No. 1. Autumn, 1960. 47. 108 Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste , trans. Jackson Mathews. London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973. 109 Suzanne Buerlac, Literary Polemics : Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton. New York, Stanford University Press, 1997. 116. 272 defined as that which forever escapes us: “the action of the beautiful on someone,” he writes “consists in rendering them mute.” 110
Within the abyss of Un coup de dés , the dice’s throw comes to trace all manner of actions and relationships, from the construction of the poem and language itself to the abyss of death over which life is forever suspended; a full spectrum from infinity to absence and an analysis of what lies between. The throw of the dice, although we can certainly extract specific meanings from it, epitomises the open relationship that exists between metaphorical meaning, language, text and world. Within this simultaneous affirmation and negation, assimilated as it is within further metaphors of destabilisation— a shipwreck, a void—the result is more than polysemy, but a hesitation of final meaning, an act of suspension which seems to peer into meaning’s abyss. The necessity of negative meaning highlights the negative ground of existence: that whatever is beyond the explicit front of existence, its articulation must be necessarily, comprehensively, negative. Like the Heideggerian imperative towards ontological negativity, it is oriented by a negative transcendental signifier: by paradox, nothingness, void.
But this abyss, as we shall see, is no vacuum. Just as Merleau-Ponty anchors meaning within Saussure’s diacritical analysis – within openness and divergence – the Mallarméan abyss can be seen to open us upon a language not of absence, but presence. This Merleau-
Pontian inflection finds us moving into meaning within the very moment of semantic failure. We might better understand such a movement through the paradoxical play of word and object that epitomises this interplay of flesh and abyss:
une fleur . . . l’absente de tous bouquets 111
110 Paul Valéry Oeuvres, Vol. I, Collection ‘La Pléiade’. Paris, Gillimard, 1957. 1308. 273 — “I say: a flower! and, outside the oblivion where my voice relegates no outline, as something other than known calyxes, musically rises the idea itself, suave, the absent of all bouquets.” 112 Initially abyssal, the instability of Mallarme’s images pushes the reader deeper and deeper into language, into a void. By directing us not to the flower itself, but the ‘absent’ flower, we enter into a persistent cycle of “transitions of meaning rather than expressions.” 113 Language itself is asserted, so that the word cannot disappear into its meaning, but echoes and reverberates around a vast play of signification. The polysemy of ‘bouquets’ enhances the mystique of this aesthetic axiom, for the absence evoked is not only of the ‘one flower’ missing from the bouquet, but of absent scent . Deeply sensuous, evocative of reminiscence and lingering nostalgia, scent can be seen to embody the expressive negativity of language’s failure in the face of phenomena.
Yet here, with a whiff of scent, in the depths of the abyss, we find a homage to language’s power—its intermingling with sensation: for even at these depths, in fact especially here, words do transport us. Any ‘tumbling’ into a linguistic abyss is stopped short when we fall, headlong, back into the sensory world. No matter how abyssal we might argue language to be, how unstable or polysemous, Mallarmé’s absent flower takes us towards scent. It takes us, that is, towards an existential intersection with the thing itself, which is to say that an abyssal assertion of language is still an assertion of language, that words do speak the reality of the thing, and sometimes better than the thing itself. The fact of the word—there before us as a joining of material and immaterial sign—brings to us its interweaving with world, takes us to the sensory interplay of the two. The paradox of Mallarmé is that to fall into the void is also to fall into meaning.
111 “a flower . . . the absent from all bouquets” Mallarmé, 1945. 368. 112 Mallarmé, 1945. 368. This translation is an altered version of Blanchot, 1995 . 30. 113 Blanchot, 1995. 33. 274 For both Mallarmé and Merleau-Ponty, expression emerges from a meaning rich chaos, from a world which language brings to us ever more forcefully via the avoidance of “pre-established signification.” Language can only “plunge into the world” when it addresses our “mute contact with things,” when it articulates a fecund silence. The silence of language must echo that of the world itself, but such silence does not take us into a barren linguistic wilderness, but into the sensory chiasm of our “prelogical bond” with language and things. 114
It is for this reason that Mallarmé’s poems are constantly, as he writes in ‘The
Afternoon of a Faun,’ “in the languor of duality”: 115 all that is balanced is also in opposition. Such polarity opens a counter logic to that of ‘objective presence,’ forming a language that is more able to deal with internal contradiction, and more able to engage our “pre-logical bond.” The closing lines of ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ depart in a dramatic shade, irresolvable and abyssal – “Couple, farewell; I go to see the shadow that you become.” 116 Merleau-Ponty would see such polarity as an inherent aspect of language, and would see the poem’s musicality 117 as emphasising the flesh of words, the movement into a sensory chiasm that is only possible via the poem’s linguistic negativities. It is this interplay between a semantic abyss and the corporeal, musical qualities of the poem, which highlights this paradoxical play of negativity and meaning.
Mallarmé’s constant attempt to destabilise meaning within the foregrounding of the signifier can thus be read through a materialist discourse that highlights the pre-linguistic essence of language within the richly auditory, but semantically problematised, presence
114 All citations in this paragraph are from VI, 38-9. 115 ‘The Afternoon of a Faun’ in Mallarmé, 1994. 40. 116 “Couple, adieu; je vais voir l’ombre que tu devins. ” ibid. Translation altered. 117 Emphasising the visceral, musical character of this work, Claude Debussy composed an orchestral score for the poem, which was performed for the first time some 18 years after Mallarmé’s poem was written. Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune , first performed in Paris, 1894. Vaslav Nijinsky would later dance ballet to Debussy’s musical score. 275 of the sign. To give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe, is, in this sense, to take the meaning of a word back to its material origins, to strip away accumulated sense so that the phonemic point of emergence comes into the foreground. Here, purity arrives within a materiality, inasmuch as the automatic semantic associations that might be seen to
‘dilute’ the sign are themselves diluted; we arrive, that is, at a purity of sensation.
Un coup de dés , a poem defined by different abyssal relationships, can then be read within a materialist context. It engages all aspects of language, from the physical characteristics of the written word, its dimensions, spaces and voids, to the material sonic qualities which, via their impact on the sensing body, present fragments of the world.
The mathematical precision with which the text is organised offers an expanded significative structure of spatiality and arrangement. We see a correspondence here not only to the linguistic materiality that is emphasised in Merleau-Ponty, but to the holistic model of truth that is accented by both he and Heidegger.
Recalling Mallarmé’s comment that the “rhythmic totality . . . will be the very silence of the poem, in its blank spaces, as that silence is translated by each structural element in its own way,” 118 we understand silence to gain both a textual materiality and the fecund signification of a meaning-rich world. Rhythm, that most material, worldly of poetic qualities, pulses with silence.
Blanchot writes that when “one has discovered an exceptional ability in language for absence and questioning, one has the temptation to consider the very absence of language as surrounded by its essence, and silence as the ultimate possibility of speech.” 119 This silence is the supreme linguistic possibility in Mallarmé. But it is, to borrow Valéry’s phrase, an embodied silence —a silence of the unity of material and immaterial—a sensory abyss: not a void, but an audible absence of sound: the ‘volumes of silence’ that might follow constant noise, a silence that brings us blinking from a reverie; an abrupt 118 Mallarmé, 1945. 367. This translation from Bruns, 2001. 112. 119 Blanchot, 1995. 34. 276 consciousness of reverberation that arrives in the attention we shift to its absence. In terms of blank Mallarméan textual space, this is the open space on a page which points to all the words which might fill it, which might, impossibly, make the page complete. It is the quiet pause in dialogue that is filled with what has been said, with what remains to be said—with what cannot be said.
There are a variety of ways in which this question of silence might be framed and understood, and we have seen different formulations of it emerge in Heidegger, Merleau-
Ponty, and now Mallarmé. Their coalescence, however, comes in the nexus of meaning- language-world as it concerns the issue of phenomenological opening and concurrance.
In Mallarmé, this question is of our connection to the literary object, of different forms of sensory textual encounter and how they relate to meaning. In all three writers, though, the consequences extend well beyond modalities of engagement with creative work. The question here is of our engagement with a world that is no less enveloping for its constant shifting and flux, it is of our remaining open to this shifting ground, to negative spaces and significations as directions towards richer, more varied forms of experience. The question is of what art teaches us, what philosophy learns from the poem and the poem from philosophy.
Although the ‘silences’ of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty both engage this ground, it is
Merleau-Ponty who offers it the urgency of concrete phenomenological conjunction.
Merleau-Ponty positions us as openings upon, and active participants in, an experiential and extra-experiential flux.
In what ways do we engage the poem and the artwork? How do we connect with natural and urban spaces, or concrete forms of ancient and contemporary sculpture? In what ways do we consider such objects and environments in relation to discourses of
277 meaning and truth? How do such engagements help determine a relationships to ‘self’ and ‘other’? As Joan Retallack emphasises via her transformation of poetics into poethics , this is not a question of ‘mere’ aesthetics—
If you’re to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are
fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches an exploration of
art’s significance as , not just about , a form of living in the real world. That as is not a
simile; it’s an ethos. 120
The embracing of a non-reductive materialist paradigm of language, a flesh of words, offers in this sense an ethical, or rather a poethical , formulation. For Mallarmé too, there is an explicit ethical dimension here. The call for a ‘purer meaning of the words of the tribe’ proposes a poethics that seeks the transfiguration of how language is conceived, of our modes of attention, of ‘absorption’ in meaning as emergence and meaning as depth.
The material qualities of language are foregrounded through semantic breakdown, offering a re-enlivening of language, which is always an enlivening of experience . But this is not about the poem or structures of discourse: they are only its location. Rather, it is about different states and possibilities of phenomenological opening, of the meaning of such openings, of the possibilities of sense-making and the sense of possibility.
Our response to the creative object, our openness to the scope and multifacetedness of experience, and our role in determining experience by responding to it—all have implications that extend beyond aesthetics as a ‘discipline’ and into the sensory as a question of engagement as environmental exchange. Mallarmé’s ‘purer language’ is one of complexity and depth; it is a language which, read here within this Merleau-Pontian poetics, enacts an elemental contact with things.
120 Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2003. 26. 278
A Merleau-Pontian poetics is, in this sense, a realisable poethics , for it is one in which language retains a grounding within experience, even as it transcends that experience, even as experience transcends articulation . It is one of consequence, of a flesh of language that embeds us more deeply within the world, rather than alienating us from it.
Such a materialist conception of expression positions language “ as , not just about ,” a form of engagement with experience, formulates it as a central component of the relationships we have with each other, with objects and spaces. Within the melding of material and conceptual, we understand both what Merleau-Ponty means when he speaks of the body as the locus of an inscription of truth and how in a corporeal and conceptual sense we are continually oriented to it.
Mallarmé’s ‘silence’ is a call to complexity within the ‘simplified materiality’ of the sign. It arrives within semantic breakdown, within expression that, as far as it does make sense semantically, is paradoxical. Here, the contradiction of paradox is seen as linguistic opening , spillage: ‘silent’ meaning flowing out from the original moment of language’s inception. The paradox is that silence arrives just as language is thrust into the foreground—that in the occlusion or destabilisation of semiotic functioning, what remains within the destabilised space of meaning is that word, the signifier pointing
‘beyond,’ but also suddenly present, a naked moment of letter and sound as themselves rising from, and falling back into, the world.
Mallarmé’s negative poetics locate us between a flesh of language and a void, and can in fact be read as a playing out of the very question of this intermediary space. But even as we tumble into the Mallarméan abyss we are ejected back into meaning, back into a world of sensation and of things.
279 These varying linguistic negativities, be they Merleau-Pontian indirection, Mallarméan paradox, or Heideggerian effacement of the sign, articulate an operative pre-linguistic signification. They offer a discourse of semantic opening, of irreducibility and indeterminacy that is simultaneously a celebration of linguistic possibility.
Although both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty articulate positions that contradict any model that separates language from a foundation within the world, it is Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, and its locating of the subject within that chiasm—of world as material and world as concept—that most adequately responds to the challenges offered by the need to engage the signifier/signified relationship. Merleau-Ponty’s negative is a linguistic opening which articulates a fullness and irreducibility of things, a negative that we articulate with through the chiasmic interrelation of body, world and word.
For Merleau-Ponty, life is expression. His philosophy of life therefore takes us into this expressive chiasm, for our way of being in the world, our engagement with things, with each other, our very body nature, is an enaction of expression. Within the dialectic of ambiguity and chiasm, we are, by our presence within the world, by each act of utterance and its opening upon the intersection of symbolic and pre-symbolic, located within a space of pre-linguistic meaning.
But neither is life itself reducible to the expressive modalities that it births: the dialectic must remain open, constantly arriving. In this, it locates itself within a model of
Romantic fragmentation and openness. The paradox of Mallarmé’s abyss is, in this sense, the paradox of language itself: the necessity of semantic fracture; that, as Bernstein tells us, to restrict meaning to the exclusively recuperable elements of language is to make meaning impossible.
280 The answer offered by the poem isn’t much – it is, to borrow a phrase from Simon
Critchley, very little, almost nothing. And yet, what the poem offers is a flesh-bound discourse of linguistic and extra-linguistic connection: the playing out of a question that sits at the centre of philosophical and cultural debate.
Whatever the paradox that an arrangement of words should communicate the extra- linguistic, it only confirms the semantic reach articulated in Bernstein’s poetically self- reflexive creation story: that when meaning ceases extending into the irrecoverable elements of communication, it becomes impossible. Merleau-Ponty takes expression back into the body, grounding both its resolvable and irresolvable aspects within the corporeal self, doing so via an original, metaphorically rich writing that, in enlivening the language of philosophy, gives a purer meaning to the words of the tribe.
For Merleau-Ponty, it is only within such ‘purity’ that philosophy might speak. He offers, then, a potential reimagining of the links and openings between language, self and world, and we come to see the poem as an opening upon, and an enactment of, this relationship.
This reimagining has real, poethical consequences. In drawing the formation and orientation of language from our body nature, Merleau-Ponty’s methodology and analysis reinscribes linguistic expression into our existential situatedness. In so doing, it recognises the irreducibility of life into that structure, and speaks of life in the only way possible: as this opening—cultural, natural, bodily, linguistic—upon what is.
281 Final Remarks (A Walk in the Park)
—It is raining. In the late afternoon I walk the paths that run the foreshore of
Rushcutters Bay, stopping to stand in the park in front of Sydney Harbour, listening to the clicking of rain on the water. No matter how I listen, how I permit myself to be drawn into this deep acoustic distance, I cannot decipher the words. To decipher is to engage in an act of translation and there is no translation here.
This language is without code.
Yet it is a speaking all the same, with the intensity of millions of crickets, trilling, a sound that surrounds me, penetrates me. There is a line from a poem by Les Murray that reads:
This country is my mind. 121
Here, amongst the sandstone escarpments and emerald waters of New South Wales, I have a sense of what this means. These places speak to me, telling me of the things that do not possess a name, of which there are many. Murray’s line describes the way places penetrate you, become inseparable from you – and you from them; the way that we are born of place. Such places speak a language that we hold within us, that fills us more entirely than any word can. It is an a-conceptual language, a language of totality, and finds linguistic re-presentation only via an abyss: the way Murray’s line reverberates and fills you, expanding the self and contracting the world, so that the two meet – somewhere, somehow – in the vibrating air. It has something to do with the bodily nature of places and things, and how we transform them into words: that when I say ‘rain’ there
121 Les Murray, ‘Evening Alone at Bunyah’ in Collected Poems. Port Melbourne, William Heinemann, 1994. 15. 282 will always be for me this visceral moment of penetration within its one long syllable, a sense of water’s touch on skin.
Martin Harrison, in his discussion of an engagement with land in Les Murray’s poem
‘At Min-Min Camp,’ talks about the ‘adverbial trace’ in poetry, which points to a not dissimilar sense of world: a “sensing of the world which is not just already interpretable and culturally meaningful but which is also beyond code. ”122 Interestingly, for Harrison it is precisely this ‘beyond’ that helps render the ‘realness’ of the text.
The gap between experience and narrative, the space of the absent adverb, remains
apparent. The problem of mode and mood does not go away. In the end it is what tells us
that this time, this place, are real. 123
Here, it is partly the limits of descriptive possibility that locate us within the real. Part of his question is whether there is a name for our experience of place, and the subsequent movement echoes a Heideggerian etymological reach, with Harrison recalling an ancient word for the experiencing of locale – “geomancy” 124 – which is, he tells us, itself inadequate. A theorised experience of place is one unavoidably distant from the edge of/beyond awareness modalities that produce our sense of local knowing: memory traces and ‘embodied’ familiarity. Such traces are not sufficiently concrete to satisfy theory’s demand for rigour. Rather, they find form in the ‘adverbial trace’; 125 the sense of the absent word, the missing piece which might, impossibly, span the gap between word and world.
122 Martin Harrison, ‘Land and Theory’ in Who Wants to Create Australia. Sydney, Halstead Press, 2004. 35. Italics added. 123 ibid., 36. 124 ibid., 35. 125 ibid. 283 I think of all the people I’ve known, the cities, oceans and forests I’ve seen. There is no magical line connecting me with my life or the lives of others, and no matter how it might be wished we do not disappear into places. Mallarmé’s ‘book’ remains impossible.
The world fills us and we respond, with speech. Between this first moment and the next—there is everything. It is a paradoxical thing, to speak and to listen, to write and to read; we are transported by words, even at times by our own. There is the gap between word and world and yet they are of the same matter – they cannot but talk of one another.
Language is the dominant way in which we structure meaning, but it is not the final repository or its ultimate origin. The hovering irresolution of meaning within the open play of signification, the emergence of meaning as an unresolved aspect of a sensory landscape, makes this apparent. The il y a¸ is, in a greater sense, language itself: it is us, folded into a flesh of things.
The moment of utterance demonstrates a deep kinship between philosopher and poet.
Although they respond in diverse and frequently contrasting ways, the spark of pre- theoretical fascination is what brings them both to speech. There is a mutual ground beneath their words, a common truth. Each articulates a space that is linked to, yet distinct from, the other.
One lesson we take from Merleau-Ponty is that of proximity. This is in part a proximity of genres, a demonstration of the common ground between philosopher and poet, and implicit within this, a demonstration of the commonality between all discourses: that each responds to this common demand—the world bursting forth in us, a world which we cannot help but name. While the differences between the disciplines are
284 palpable and real, they are not absolute: the philosopher must be, as he is for Valéry, an
“artist of thought.” 126
But it is more than this also: philosophy is part literature and part science. Each has its truth. Each is vital.
The rain eases, stops, and slowly, almost mournfully, a ferry breaks the swell towards the city. The lights of office towers make a patchwork of white squares, and the clouds open behind the bridge, firing the gap between earth and sky, so that the remnants of day glow bright orange for just an instant before they’re swallowed again in shadow. I turn to go back to my desk, my books, my life. The streets are empty. The rain begins again, softly, collecting in small rivulets in the creases of my jacket, wetting my face. I am within this world, and it is within me.
I can feel a poem begin to form, as yet wordless, somewhere at the edge of things.
From nowhere identifiable, there is that sense of language rising up; rising, it seems, from this penetration itself. The world entering me as light, as substance, as sound—and within their commingling something surges, there, out from the void.
126 Saisselin, 1960. 51. See also Valéry, 1957. 1247. 285 286
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