Heidegger

Hey Bernard,

I came across a good point by John Ruskin from _Modern Painters_ (!848). He
writes, “A few shapeless scratches or accidental stains in the wall, or the
form of clouds, or any other complicated accidents, will set the imagination
to work to coin something out of them; and all paintings in which there is
much gloom or mystery, posseses therin a certain sublimity owing to the play
given to the beholder’s imagination” and he goes on to discuss the
disrespect of the beholder by painters who tell and show all leaving little
play for alternate readings so to speak. But does a blank slate do this for
us? Maybe, if it is a written smooth texture like we find when we depart on
our journey into the desert which means we are refining our sensory
perception so we can detect more subtle phenomena which may not have a
mechanical cause or exist within a subject-predicate order. Perhaps Ruskin
is thinking of a more gothic and baroque notion of the sublime but in his
case and those in which a more abstract modern approach is taken what does
emerge is a concept of the infinite. The sublime is the infinite. An
ineffible mystery is the infinite. The ‘form’ of clouds represents the
infinite. This is what it means to be guided by the clouds during our
sojourning on the desert. It is to be open to the guidance of the infinite
or sublime.

Tympan

Posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
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