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Heidegger’s Mysterious Omission:
William Desmond’s Critique of Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art
Abstract
Although Heidegger begins his “Origin of the Work of Art” with the word “Origin,” Ursprung, William Desmond’s critique questions how deeply into the issue of origin Heidegger was willing to take his inquiry. Desmond advances this exploration further into the “power” at work in this originating activity by proceeding into theological territory. First I outline the originating and perpetuating features of the work of art that Heiddeger gives in his “Origin of the Work of Art.” I then provide Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of this ontological structure, which he discusses in his “Art and the Self-Concealing Origin: Heidegger’s Equivocity and the Still Unthought Between.” I will try to argue that Desmond offers a better account: Desmond is right to note that an overabundant origin that remains always other, and whose overdeterminate being is responsible for transcendence, is the more original origin of the originating activity of the work of art. And as well, it is the more original origin of the giving force that lends to the perpetuation of the originating activity of the work of art.
The Originating “Work” of Art
In “Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger begins with the question of the origin of the work of art, and by origin he means, “that from and by which something is what it is and as it is” (Heidegger 17). Thus what are included in his pursuit of the origin of the work of art are ontological concerns, namely that “from which” (its originating source) and that “by which” (its perpetuating source) a work of art is “what it is” (its constitution) and is “as it is” (its activity). So Heidegger will be looking at the originating and perpetuating source of the constitution and activity of the work of art, which itself is a source of origination, as we will find out. In the following I will trace through the passages that lend to Heidegger’s account of this originating and perpetuating feature of the work of art.
Heidegger’s ontological concerns about the work of art lead him to his consideration of its “thingly character,” a consideration that brings him to the topic of the equipmental character of things. This then leads him to an example of such equipment, a pair of shoes, an example he finds to be well exhibited in Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes. He finds the traits of equipmentality in this painting, and notes that because the painting revealed the thingness of the thing, that the “art work let us know what the shoes are in truth.” For, “what is at work in the work” is “the disclosure of the particular being in its being, the happening of truth" (35; 38). This initiates a discussion of truth in relation to the ontological features of the work of art. He explains:
[t]he art work opens up in its own way the Being of beings. This opening up, i.e., this deconcealing, i.e., the truth of beings, happens in the work. In the art work, the truth of what is has set itself to work. Art is truth setting itself to work. (39)
Now having indicated a relationship between the activity of the work of art and the truth of beings, Heidegger moves to a discussion of two ontological features of the work of art he sees as elemental forces involved in the active and dynamic constitution of the happening of truth and origination in the work of art.
These two elemental features of the event of truth and being found in the work of art are earth and world, which are both oppositional to each other while at the same time providing for and accentuating each other. The world is the “self-disclosing openness of the broad paths of the simple and essential decisions in the destiny of an historical people,” and the earth is “the spontaneous forthcoming of that which is continually self-secluding and to that extent sheltering and concealing” (48). The two “are essentially different from one another and yet are never separated,” for “the world grounds itself on the earth, and earth juts through world;” but, they do not cancel each other out (49). Rather, their striving to overcome each other carries on continuously: the world, “[a]s self-opening it cannot endure anything closed,” while the earth, “as sheltering and concealing, tends always to draw the world into itself and keep it there” (49), and these opposing aims never seem to find resolution in the work of art. However, their strife is mutually beneficial, even if antagonistic, because, “[i]n the struggle each opponent carries the other beyond itself” (49). The art work’s role in this strife is its “setting up a world and setting forth the earth” and thereby “instigating” “this striving” (49). Heidegger then asks how truth happens through this striving of world and earth, which returns him to the topic of truth.
In this part of his treatment of truth, Heidegger reminds us of the Greek term aletheia, which he takes to mean the unconcealedness of beings (51). However, Heidegger extends this definition of truth to include the concealing of beings that necessarily accompanies the unconcealing (53). In fact, there is a double concealing in the concealing/unconcealing activity of truth, because that very act of concealing is concealed (54). Heidegger then brings together the features of earth and world with concealing and unconcealing, saying that “[t]he nature of truth is, in itself, the primal conflict” and that the “[e]arth juts through the world and world grounds itself on the earth only so far as truth happens as the primal conflict between clearing and concealing” (55). He then draws in the notion of art again, about which he says that its “work-being” is one of the ways “in which truth happens” (55). Thus, through the work of art, the constituent activities of truth, unconcealing and concealing, happen through the strife of the unconcealing, opening, and broadening world feature of the work, which is productively in conflict with its concealing, closing, and grounding earth feature. This account of the truth activity of the work of art explains the “what it is” (its constitution), and the “as it is” (its activity); and in the following, we will look at that “by which” the work of art is “what it is” “as it is,” which we are taking as its “preserving,” “subsisting,” or “perpetuating” feature.
The art work’s subsisting, preserving, perpetuating feature is a concern throughout the text. He explains that “[n]othing can be discovered about the thingly aspect of the work so long as the pure self-subsistence of the work has not distinctly displayed itself” (40), which indicates that an essential ontological feature of the work of art is its perpetuating. He traces this self-subsistence to the productive strife of world and earth, saying of them that “[t]hey belong together” “in the unity of work-being,” and that “[t]his is the unity we seek when we ponder the self-subsistence of the work and try to express in words this closed, unitary repose of self-support” (48). Put another way, the interaction of world and earth, and thus of unconcealing and concealing, is responsible for the subsistence of the work of art. I take this to mean that, because their strife is never resolved on account of the mutual dependence, and mutual provision, of the striving forces, that the work of art, which is the “arena” of their striving, persists so long as the striving persists. In this configuration, it seems, the persistence of the concealedness of truth and of ontological happening, which must always be there for the unconcealedness of truth and of ontological happening, is what always makes room for further movement of the play of unconcealing, which itself has its own concealed. Thus, inherent in the ontological structure of this ontological happening through which truth happens is an always necessary continuance, because there is an always necessary lack that always seems to be in the process of being filled, while at the same time, this filling creates another lack, a process that seems to perpetuate on account of its structural “instability” or “dynamic constitution,” if these terms would suffice. (In Desmond’s critique, as we will see later, this structural feature is considered “erotic”).
It is through this dynamic, oppositional and productive activity of strife through which truth occurs that Heidegger accounts as the originating feature of the work of art. He explains,
[t]he establishing of truth in the work is the bringing forth of a being such as never was before and will never come to be again. The bringing forth places this being in the Open in such a way that what is to be brought forth first clears the openness of the Open into which it comes forth. Where this bringing forth expressly brings the openness of beings, or truth, that which is brought forth is a work. Creation is such a bringing forth. As such a bringing, it is rather a receiving and an incorporating of a relation to unconcealedness. (62)
From this passage, we see that the work of art itself originates, because it is through its unconcealing/concealing, striving activity of world and earth that beings come to be and are created. Heidegger later moves to discuss the poetic nature of this event, saying, “[t]he nature of art is poetry. The nature of poetry, in turn, is the founding of truth” (75). Here we see him speaking of originating in terms of a “founding,” about which he takes in a “triple sense”: “founding as bestowing, founding as grounding, and founding as beginning;” but, founding “is actual only in preserving. Thus to each mode of founding there corresponds a mode of preserving” (75). Thus, art is poetry, in that it enacts the unconcealing/concealing event of truth and is something through which humans may have a hermeneutic relationship with this event; also, this event “founds” truth, in that it is a bestowing, grounding, and beginning, which seems to be language evoking the originating activity of art; as well, this passage also indicates that inherent to this originating is a preserving. Heidegger explains further that “[f]ounding is an overflow, an endowing, a bestowal” (75). From this sort of language, we would expect that Heidegger will give a more specific account of this overflowing of giving in the originating event; however, as we will see in the next part of our treatment in where we look at William Desmond’s critique, Heidegger mysteriously leaves out this part of the configuration.
The Origin of the Originating of the Work of Art
William Desmond is also concerned with origins and art in his “Art and the Self-Concealing Origin: Heidegger’s Equivocity and the Still Unthought Between,” much in the same way that Heidegger is; as Desmond puts it: “I am interested in the otherness of the origin and what art might communicate of it, and how this challenges ways of philosophical articulation” (Desmond 210). However, it is in regard to this otherness of the origin, and what art communicates of it, where Desmond differs from Heidegger. In the following, I will look at passages in Desmond’s text that offer his critique of Heidegger’s ontological configuration and that offer Desmond’s reconfiguration; and, throughout, I will give my best explanation of his terminology, where appropriate.
Although Desmond appreciates Heidegger’s dedication to the question of being, as well as his sense of the mysteriousness of the truth-giving and being-giving activity found in the work of art, Desmond also senses that something is missing from that configuration. He notes that Heidegger “shows some finesse for an elemental equivocity of being, itself inseparable from the creative power of the aesthetic, and the generative power of sources of being beyond univocal determination” (235); by which I take him to mean that he appreciates Heidegger’s treating being as something that cannot be given a fixed, stable, self-identical determination, but instead as something that is dynamic rather than stable, and also as something that cannot be pinned down and fully captured in a description or definition. This feature of being’s lacking, that brings about the strife and dynamic development, Desmond calls an “erotic” origin. Desmond’s configuration includes such an erotics in the happening of origination, but his configuration goes further to account for this erotic feature of origination. As he explains:
Heidegger’s polemos is the struggle of erotic sovereignty, modeled on an agon, not on creation as an agapeic giving of an other as other. If there are hints of something like the second, Heidegger does not make clear the difference of this erotic struggle of earth and world, and the agape of creation as giving (as) giving. (Not thought thinking thought, or will willing will, or writing writing writing; but giving giving giving—this is the hyperbole of the agapeic origin.) (246)
For Desmond, “erotic” means more than just sexual eros; it “refers us to the inordinate restlessness of the human being as desire without determinate limit, restlessness in finite being that shows the sign of its own infinity” (“Caesar with the Soul of Christ” 39); and “erotic sovereignty,” then, for him “is connected with the expression of power in its highest representatives, with the overcoming of the lack in our desire, with the activating of our energies as self-transcending and towards their fullest affirmation” (38). Thus, if we apply this definition to the case of strife, Desmond seems to regard the struggle between world and earth not only to be one of strife, but one of desire to overcome lack, which in this case may be the mutual lacking from the mutually exclusive but mutually dependent relationship between world and earth.
Yet, this ontological lack in Heidegger’s configuration, according to Desmond, is not just inherent in the dynamic struggle between opposing forces of world and earth, but also this lack must come from an original lack. He explains in Being and the Between in the chapter “Origin,” that
the beginning of eros suggests the opening of the sense of lack. I desire something here because I lack that something; eros seeks what it lacks in the origin; its vector of transcendence towards the other and beyond itself is with the view of overcoming the lack of the beginning. (249)
Yet, Heidegger seems to want two incompatibilities in his configuration of the originating event of art: he wants there to be an ever unfolding dynamic interplay of opposing forces that never find resolution and persist endlessly in their creative, originating activities, and he also wants there to be an inherent lack from the beginning that remains throughout the unfolding of the originating activity. This is a problem, as Desmond points out, because through this struggle comes a giving whose source is a lacking, and we may wonder, from what source comes the giving, then? As he puts it, “[i]f the nothing is all that there is to give the background to the finite foreground, then there is nothing about it that could originate or create in the properly ontological respect that is required by the situation.” “Since Hiedegger is talking about creation, and hence a coming to be, this possibility cannot do either” (“Art and the Self-Concealing Origin” 250). Thus, Heidegger’s maintaining an exclusively “erotic” origin runs counter to his description of its overflowing, endowing, and bestowing, because there is no account of that original source of the overflow.
Which is not to say that Desmond rejects the erotic origin. On the contrary, he understands it as a facet of the “equivocal” nature of being, which is among three other senses of being. The first is the “univocal,” in which stability and sameness are emphasized; the second is the equivocal, where irresolvable differences are given greatest weight; the third is the dialectical, where differences are mediated, except too often in self-mediation, which does not respect the otherness of the other; and the fourth is the metaxological, which is mindful of the previous three: it respects the consistencies we find, as well as the differences, and also the mediation and transcendence, except in the metaxological configuration, the mediation is towards the other which remains other, which is unlike the self-mediation of the dialectical in where the other is a means to arrive back upon the self, and thus is not truly taken to be an other. In this dialectical configuration, the self transcends to the other but is really transcending towards itself. However, in the metaxological configuration, that transcendence is towards an other that remains other, and thus the transcendence is of a self that moves past its own determinate bounds towards the other and into the between space of proximity with the other.
To better account for this metaxological orientation that underlies Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of Heidegger’s ontology in “Origin of the Work of Art,” I will speak briefly in regard to the ontological features of this metaxological configuration. Desmond takes being to be overdeterminate, which means that it is in such great abundance, that, although it wells up from within determinate beings, it cannot be contained within those determinate bounds, and thus issues from out of the determinate beings to other determinate beings, which themselves are also issuing forth overdeterminate being. One way we as humans come to know of this overdeterminate being is through the “aesthetics of happening;” for example, when seeing a work of art or a beautiful person, we get the sense that there is something more than what is determinately there that is being communicated to us. In these instances, our senses discover a “too muchness” issuing forth to us. When we become “porous” in the sense of letting our determinate bounds be more open to the exchange of overdeterminate being with other determinate beings, we better allow ourselves to transcend to an other that remains other, which moves us more into that between space of proximity with the other as other. An ethics of gratitude and generosity would be a way of being porous to the other so to let the overdeterminate being more freely exchange between the self and other. Yet, not only is the determinate other always other, so too is that source of overdeterminate being that provides for the community of beings brought together into the between space of proximity. As well, the source is “agapeic,” which means that it is always giving its overabundance. We cannot but regard this overabundant giving of being as good; and, because it is good, abundantly giving, and other to us, it communicates something from beyond that we would be inclined to ponder as God. Just as we may transcend toward the other into the between space of proximity with it, we may wonder if also we can transcend toward this ultimate other into the between space of proximity with a divine origin.
With this metaxological configuration in mind, we may better see Desmond’s concerns with Heidegger’s ontology in “Origin of the Work of Art.” For, he explains, that if the origin is not agapeic and we create from nothing, then our powers of creating
do not qualify the nothing, but are themselves qualified by the nothing. Hence every effort of ours to be more than nothing, and in a new and original way, is itself qualified by a constitutive nothingness that simply is inherent in the being of finitude as such. The original gift, as much as this ontological qualification by our nothingness, always means that our creation cannot but be in the gift of the more original power of being as other to us. (253)
Thus, the origin of origination must be agapeic and other to us, because if it were but an erotic lack, then when we are self-creative, we cannot actually create anything of ourselves. In terms of the origination of the work of art, if the origin of that origination is not giving but instead lacking, then nothing is being created. And not only would it be impossible for the origination process to originate without an agapeic origin, it would also be impossible for it to subsist; for he says,
[w]hat we call the between is an ontological given. The origin of the given happening might be called a giving giving; not just a giver, but a giving for the giving, hence not just a once off univocal act, but a continuous origination, where continuous does not here mean the continuity of time but something more like the constancy of eternity, and not a nunc stans, if by this we mean to contract this giving giving into a univocal and merely static eternity. (259)
Thus, not only does Desmond’s configuration seem to better account for the art work’s originating activity, it also seems to better account for its persistence as well.
Implicit in Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration are theological concerns. He is aware that Heidegger abandoned his religious beliefs after a serious read of Nietzche, but Desmond wonders if Heidegger’s religious beliefs may not themselves have been concealed in his writing, because it would seem as though a further development of his ontology would reveal his theological presuppositions, especially if the ontology were developed much in the way Desmond develops his, which seems to follow from what Heidegger has willingly put forth. Although Heidegger does make oblique references to the divine in such passages as “[t]hrough Being there passes a veiled destiny that is ordained between the godly and the countergodly” (“Origin of the Work of Art” 53), he never seems to adequately explain these references to the divine, which is curious considering that they may have better accounted for his ontology. Desmond takes Heidegger to have developed a “metaphysical paralysis” that prevents him from regarding the ultimacy of transcendence as other. “Great art seems to wake us from this paralysis” (“Art and the Self-Concealing Origin” 262), Desmond writes, but it seems Heidegger, even before the peasant’s shoes of Van Gogh or the Greek temple, fought back at its waking power with a willful resistance to becoming “porous” to its overabundant giving.
Thus, I hope to have adequately described the ontological features of Heidegger’s configuration of the work of art for the purposes of incorporating Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of Heidegger’s ontology. We saw that Heidegger’s configuration is one in which the conflicting forces of concealing and unconcealing, through the elements of world and earth, are at work in the work of art, and it is through this process that truth happens. Through this event of truth in the art work, beings come to be what they are in truth, and thus the work of art is an originating activity; and from the unresolvability of the conflicting forces and with the help of human participants, the work of art subsists in its originating activity. We then turned to William Desmond’s critique and reconfiguration of Heidegger’s ontology of the work of art. From his critique, we came to see what is missing from Heidegger’s ontological configuration, namely, an agapeic origin of overdeterminate being that enables transcendence toward an other as other, and this source itself remains other despite our transcending toward it into the between space of proximity with it. Heidegger’s origin is erotic, in that it supposedly comes from, and perpetually engenders, a lack; however, we found that such an originary lack is insufficient to account for the always originating and perpetuation activity of the work of art. Thus, we may be inclined to prefer Desmond’s configuration on these grounds. Although Desmond does not want lose the mysteriousness of the origin that we find in Heidegger, Desmond does want to be more honest about the theological implications of the sort of ontology Heidegger offers us; and, we found that Desmond’s reconfiguration maintains this otherness, because the agapeic origin remains other to us, and despite our transcending toward the between space of proximity with it, we never fully arrive there, and thus, as with Heidegger, it remains in mystery, except one that, according to Desmond’s quotation of Jaspers, “does not leave us with empty hands” (263).
Works Cited
Desmond, William. “Art and the Self Concealing Origin: Heidegger’s
Equivocity and the Still Unthought Between” Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Philosophy and Art. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2003.
Desmond, William. Being and the Between. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995.
Desmond, William. “Caesar with the Soul of Christ: Nietzsche’s Highest
Impossibility.” Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 61/1999, p.27-61.
Heidegger, Martin. “Origin of the Work of Art.” Poetry, Language, Thought.
Transl. Albert Hofsadter. London: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc, 1971.
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