Heidegger

Dear Bernard,

This thread is digressing in an interesting direction as it tends to when
you misread when I attempt to show a trail that leads by way of language to
the sound of a voice itself before it is understood which you seem to hear
very well with a man-of-mind intention. You seem to think of painting like
Pollock as the act itself, as a dribble that by definition is purely an
event of doing and being, of dwelling there with the very experience of
painting as it happens in the moment of the painters life. So anything that
could be said about it is mere talk about something that is not engaged in
the process of painting itself. Painting is self-sufficient and doesn’t need
a reason or an explanation.It is a frutition without a why and a literal
metaphor of tarrying alongside the nothing . But it was Apollonaire that
suggested that poetry had a plastic element that engaged something like
drawing and painting as part of its design. Poetry could be seen as a
hieroglyphic that did not show its meaning but presented the mystery of a
dribble or some incomprehensible cry. So it is the dribble of language that
brings us close to an artistic event or phenomena that is prior to logos
being mostly phone, an expression of an animal’s soul. This is naive art and
it depends on an *abissemnet du niveau mental*, on an epoche of the
sentimental artist inside of us who asserts her intentions on the emerging
work. When Heidegger distinguishes the trascending freedom of Dasein from
phenomenological intentionality this leads from sentimental art to the naive
art of a somewhat primitive entity like Pollock. Pollock’s approach to
painting is that of an illiterate almost beyond culture or at most waiting
for it suspended on a borderline thought that is as much nature as it is
something readable making it a extension of a gesture that holds a bucket of
non-sense and dribbles its content over this empty surface. One doesn’t have
to try and explain Pollock in so many words but it is possible to break the
frame of a painting and its relation to a life as it happens from moment to
momeny which makes one of his paintings more surreal and an actual and real
possibility which seems to attempt the impossible. And the desert? The
desert spreads… and so does the mirage that leads our hope of an
imaginative moment out of this aporia like that of the spurt of an octopus’
ink;– like your act before a student’s canvas that marks the moment that
says begin! A cloud of ink dissimulates the clarity of intent but just that
splits the path into a crossroad whose name is called “chance”. There is
your transitional space, the in-between where a just center takes hold and a
release can happen through a point of instability. The in-between is the
interaction of the sun’s light which comes from the sky and water which
comes from the earth which is what the seeds need into order to sprout and
evolve into a fugue-like pattern. Chance is like noise in information theory
and the in-between is that dynamic tension between the airy light and the
rigid earth and the future of the seed is an epiphany of our imagination
like “the trout” by Schubert. It might be perverse to populate the desert in
such a manner with culture but it only seems this way, its wild place still
remains visible. It’s a way of not dying of consumption, of not bowing down
before the noise of culture so that there may be signs of a path that leads
to the felt sense of our surrounding world, to a wild place that is not a
human resource, to a cry of language that is a real possibility. And what is
happening when we dribble? Nothing happens that could be explained by so
many words except the tragic distress of the absence of meaning, but let’s
be precise, the absence of *human* meaning. Tragic distress is not nothing.
This is how one moves through a growing desert emptying out its relative
values and is the * a priori* of effective change where who we are can be
reorganized. It is tragedy that brings people together and which gives us a
sense of being part of the same family, of a universal. Without tragedy
there is no mobilization of deep transformative change that is more than
greening the way we use human resources. When we listen to the growth of
deserts what begins to happen? The activity of whirlwinds begins to increase
which is also what uproots the meaning of words mixing them up and creating
noise… The spinning tops of nature makes everything loose balance and
creates disorder but this is the condition for the emergence of a new more
complex order. It is not like tragic wisdom is something deplorable or an
excuse to become pessimistic and cynical but rather it’s an opportunity and
more, it’s a challenge. Dwellling in the desert is an openness to wind. I
leave you today with the words of Marc Froment-Meurice from a book called
_Solitudes_ which is worth reading: “Descendant of the Latin term *desero*
(meaning to abandon, leave, depart,– to desert), desert speaks of
departure, it speaks the separation or a-part (an interval or the
in-between). As well, it speaks a secession that is also an accession or
initiation– to the very solitude that none but hermits and shepherds,
fanatics of God and poets, the illiterate and dispossessed may haunt.”

Sincerely,
Tympan

Dear tympan;
As a painter I entirely reject either a philosopher’s (e.g., Heidegger) or a
psychologist’s (e.g., Freud/Jung) understanding of art. Although of the
three
Jung did pictures and sculpture by no means did they represent a primary
relation to paint and painting, sculpture and sculpting but are secondary
efforts
of a thinking mind. “Thinking,” of course, is anathema to creative process
by
which creativity asserts itself with all thinking holds barred. Otherwise we
must understand it as “design” or “applied art” in this case as the
epiphenomenon to an essentially philosophical or psychological intention and
its ground in
“thinking.” The creative process by contrast must find its ground in
sensation, feeling and intuition and a spontaneity of action that is not
hinged in
pre-thought thinking. Otherwise there would be no reason to paint if such
were
the case and a literary analytic mode would serve just as well. But that
would
preclude the proto-erotic sensation and complete participation of the
painter
in the work and which requires a relatively complete *abbaisment du niveau
mental* and which for the psychologist would be fit only for the expression
of
someone suffering dementia praecox (schizophrenia, cf., Jung’s essay on
Picasso)
or what would otherwise be outright rejected by a man-of-mind philosopher.
The only philosopher I know who rises above such reductions of the creative
process is Plato in his Ion Dialogue. Here Plato is free of a Rudolf
Bultman’s
demythologizations or his student Heidegger completing a deconstruction of
the
mythogenic ground by subjecting it to da-sein-ization, thrown out and
dissipated
out there in the world of things as beings and which by now is embraced in
“post-modern” positivism. But art fares as badly with the analytical
psychologist such as Jung who renders it as a mere vehicle for demonstrating
mythogenic
and psychogenic (archetypal) motifs. That is why Jung misread both Picasso
and
James Joyce or Heidegger did as much in his asessment of the work of Paul
Klee. In either case art is subverted by analytic reduction to the
philosopher or
psychologist thinking ourve and so well documented in Freud’s reductions of
Leonardo’s work to psychoanalytic criteria. Neither Heideger or Jung picked
up
where Edmund Burke and then Kant (in his Critque of Judgement) began, even
as
they skirmished the subject of the sublime contra The Beautiful. In any case
there is far more a need for participation in a work of art, to feel one’s
way
rather than think it through to an empty radix.
Sincerely;
Bernard

In a message dated 3/1/2007 4:23:33 PM Eastern Standard Time,
daxsein at hotmail.com writes:

I came across an essay by Jung on art and poetry where he describes the two
ways of introvertion extravertion as ways of engaging the creative process.
The extraverted or Schiller’s “naive” attitude is the one that is like
magnetic sleep as discussed by Hegel in his anthropology. This is hypnosis
where consiousness is suspended and one seems to be possesed by a muse or a
genius. Dasein would have to be extraverted since it involves that
repetition which is a constantly renewed resolution or act of remembrance
which then through practice becomes habit or ethos, that is, a felt sense of
the surrounding world. This sense is not the thinking of something but a
sense of wonder. In Being and Time Heidegger considers this inspiration as a
call. He writes: “The caller is Dasein in its uncanniness (not at home or
the “nothing” of the world) […] The caller is unfamiliar to the everyday
they-self (who is lost in filling up boredom with curiosity or the
machinations of lived-experience as he says in _Contributions_. The
they-self is tranquilized or sleeping and can’t hear the call but when it
does it starts to wake up. The call brings the they-self to its ownmost
possibility individuating it into Selfhood or singularity. Dasein when it
hears a muse that’s when Selfhood begins to find itself and recover from its

restless curiosity and sleep where it is lost and where it fills up boredom
with interesting objects of thought that represents relative goods that
don’t lead to the “nothing” of the world. Relative goods cover up the sense
of wonder (where we admire the intrinsic value of the ten thousand things
themselves.) Being lost in the pursuit of relative goods is not being able
to *tarry alongside* that which is near us. It is what is closest to us that
is most difficult to see and that because of the curiosity of the they-self
lost in the identification with objects of thought. In section 36 Heidegger
writes: “Curiosity is characterized by a specific way of *not tarrying*
alongside what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of
tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of
continual novelty and changing encounters. In not tarrying, curiosity is
concerned with the constant possibility of distraction. Curiosity has
nothing to do with observing entities and marvelling at them — thaumazein.
To be amazed to the point of not understanding is something in which it has
no interest.” So you see curiosity is the opposite of a sense of wonder. It
is what blocks off that possibility of developing the ethos of wonder.
Curiosity here in Being and Time is what Heidgger comes to call the
machinations of lived-experience in Contributions. This is also what blocks
the possbility of the experience distress which is necessary for moving on
to another beginning as it is necessary in any significant change in a
person’s life. Tudor, it is interesting to compare Heidegger’s discussion of
boredom and curiosity to what sociologists like Simmel would have called
ennui. Or we could go to a skeptic like Pascal:

“Man finds nothing so intolerable as to be in a state of complete rest,
without passions, without occupation, without diversion, without effort.
Then he faces his nullity, loneliness, inadequacy, dependence, helplessness,
emptiness. And at once there wells up from the depths of his soul
boredom, depression, chagrin, resentment, despair.”

So distress is also what Kierkegaard would call anguish, spiritual anxiety.
When one goes from philosophy to faith it is this distress or anguish that
has to be gone through that might also be described as griefwork because the
old adam is dying.

Posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 12:00 am
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