1. The issue
The other beginning - belonging to beyng - art as founding agent of history
- Hölderlin as the poet of the Germans - overcoming metaphysics -
transmutation of human being - these are only some of the great themes
one encounters on reading Heidegger. This prominent figure of 20th century
thinking embodies an extreme thinking and attracts precisely because a
diagnosis of the world situation as well as an overcoming of this situation
is posited in the thinking of being. The diagnosis announced is the forgottenness
of and by being. The overcoming would lead to human being belonging to
beyng. Heidegger himself is a thinker of the transition who wants to prepare
this great metamorphosis with all his might and with all the sacrifice
necessary. A great shadow is also cast over this illustrious thinking,
a shadow with a name: National Socialism, perhaps the most ugly word in
German history. Heidegger was, at least for a time and in his own way,
a committed National Socialist. It is doubtful whether he ever distanced
himself from this commitment unequivocally or felt remorse and shame, to
say nothing about whether he confronted himself adequately with his own
entanglement in National Socialism and that on a plane equal to his thinking.
Thinking would have had to suffer through shame and remorse instead of
remaining inflexible.
Heidegger expected a lot from a single poet. He tailored his thinking about
art and the art work to Hölderlin. How can one speak about Hölderlin
as the poet of the Germans after the historical disaster of National Socialism?
There are two further concepts in Heidegger that crop up regularly in his
texts when National Socialism is spoken about: Americanism and Bolshevism.
Others would call these capitalism and socialism and they would probably
be using more apposite concepts, especially since the word socialism is
contained the word National Socialism. Is Heidegger's talk of National
Socialism, Americanism and Bolshevism in various lectures of the thirties
and forties a match for his thinking proper, or is it a much too direct
and unsettling short circuiting of his thinking of the history of being
with the political events of his time? Did Heidegger ever think
National Socialism adequately?(1)
If not, this would presumably be the gravest charge that could be levelled
at this great thinker.
Even fifty years after the collapse of National Socialism, German is in
many quarters an ill-reputed word that arouses suspicion. That the Germans
today could have an historical mission to fulfil would still provoke uneasy
astonishment and fear. Many people today think that it is a good thing
that the Germans have been dipped in the element of Americanism, and that
not only because the German economy has flourished since the Second World
War, but because so-called Americanism has instilled significantly more
democratic attitudes in the Germans. Heidegger's commitment to a revolutionary
change in the course of Western history and even to a leap into an other
beginning must arouse considerable mistrust as long as the ugly word National
Socialism in its relation to his thinking has not been clarified. What
is the locus of National Socialism in the history of being? Did Heidegger
ever define this locus, or did he only hide in Sybilline remarks? What
does it mean when Heidegger speaks of the "historical uniqueness of National
Socialism"(2)? Is that black humour?
Does the historical "matchlessness"(3)
of National Socialism consist in German being having destroyed itself in
an orgy of self-annihilation? Was the attempted annihilation of the Jews
the successful suicide of Germany, i.e. German being, as an independent
historical magnitude? Can this self-annihilation, i.e. decline, be discerned
in the post-war history of German philosophy?
Since with the word 'Americanism', Heidegger had drawn a line between himself
and everything American, he was never able to involve himself with an American.
In 1933 he remained as a German on the side of the Germans, while others
of his generation, pressed by the distress of these times, emigrated to
the United States. European intellectuals have had a profound influence
on American art, and especially German intellectuals have had a profound
influence on American thinking. In the forties, the 'German spirit' flourished
there in the 'colony'. It lived in one of the towers on Manhattan. For
this reason I want to bring the name John Cage (an artist and intellectual
deeply rooted in European traditions, even though he breaks with them)
into play as a counterweight and alternative to the German name Hölderlin.
At the start it cannot be foreseen where this gamble will lead to, presupposing
that Cage, as a trailblazing American composer, has a status to equal that
of the German poet Hölderlin. Probably no greater artistic contrast
could be imagined than that between Cage and Hölderlin. These are
two completely different worlds, perhaps two different historical destinies.
Heidegger expressed his assessment of modern art globally in the Spiegel
interview in 1966:
That is precisely the big question: Where does art stand? What is its
locus? [...] I want to say for the record however that I cannot see what
is pioneering in modern art, especially because it remains obscure where
it sees the propermost element of art, or at least searches for it.(4)
Heidegger regards art as a pioneering force that guides history into its
course and thus grounds history. He is speaking here of course against
the foil of his own questioning that made a great effort to determine the
locus of art, especially in the Hölderlin lectures as well as in the
lectures on the origin of the work of art in the thirties. The locus of
art (how could it be otherwise?) can only be determined in the thinking
of being by proceeding from beyng. For Heidegger modern art is obscured.
Does it lie in concealment, in that which conceals itself? Can clarity
about the locus of modern art be gained?
To finally reach a point where Heidegger and Cage can have it out with
each other, and that on a philosophical plane, we must first lay the groundwork
by interpreting core elements of Heidegger's understanding of art, i.e.
his determination of the locus of art(5).
The art work is located in the transition to the other beginning. We must
therefore find out more about the other beginning.
2. The other beginning in the Contributions to Philosophy
The Contributions from 1936-1938 represent Heidegger's great attempt
at self-clarification. Here the quarry is staked out from which in the
years to follow Heidegger will enrich his writings. All the essential components
of this thinking after Being and Time are worked out here in private
in the turning stillness of a three-year meditation. The Contributions
are therefore today the treasure trove for deciphering the deepest
intentions of the thinking of being. According to Heidegger, a lot is at
stake, namely, the decision "between history or loss of history, i.e. between
a belonging to beyng or abandonment among non-entities" (GA65:100). Abandonment
would mean the "transition to the technicized animal"(6),
history by contrast would mean "dread in the jubilation of belonging to
being". (GA65:99)
Only the most extreme decision from and about the truth of beyng can
still produce clarity. Otherwise, the twilight of innovations and covering
over will continue, or a total breakdown will occur.(7)
Heidegger's thinking goes to the extreme. Philosophy and a necessary, distress-turning
task of thinking exist only in a situation of historical distress. For
this reason his thinking is an enormous imposition that understandably
provokes opposition. If today thinking still has a place, this imposition
can only be accepted in order to find out whether there is a distress and
a distress-turning necessity in Western history and what their respective
characters are. In the above quotation it is remarkable that the "most
extreme decision" is to create "clarity", remarkable because Heidegger
is the thinker of a turning in the essencing of truth into concealedness
and moreover names "presentiment" as the basic mood of the transition to
the other beginning. Can the distress in Western history be turned about
by a decision that produces clarity?
In the realm of technology, the people of today - we - have been abandoned
by beyng. We have not simply forgotten to think of something but have ourselves
been forgotten by beyng in its self-concealment. For Heidegger therefore,
thinking can be nothing other than preparing human essencing to be adopted
by beyng. This would be the event as the appropriation of human essencing
to the property of beyng. What should we think about this? Could the event
eventuate in Western history? It could only take place, if at all, if the
abandonment by being were the distressing destiny of Western - and by now
planetary - humanity. But how can we experience what constitutes the distress
of our historical situation? Only by thinking through Heidegger once again.
Those who think through are seldom and will presumably remain so. Heidegger
saw precisely this circumstance and therefore speaks in the Contributions
about the "seldom" and the "few". It would be all too easy to simply label
this elitism.
The event would only eventuate through a leap that leaps into the there
of being-there, simultaneously founding it. The there is the open clearing
for the truth of beyng, i.e. for the clearing of self-concealment, since
beyng conceals itself. The leap would be the "founding of the open place
of momentariness for an historical being of humankind" (GA65:234). Heidegger
has solely the possibility of this founding in mind, which "places humankind
first of all in the space for the play of the incidence and nonappearance
of the advent and flight of the gods". (GA65:234) The decision in favour
of history would make the passing by of the "last god" possible. In preparing
the other beginning through asking the basic question, Heidegger himself
leaps to the question about the essencing of beyng. Today, Heidegger's
questioning and his language cause astonishment in many ways. But there
is no escape. We can ask along with Heidegger, even then and especially
when we try to think against him. The opponents have to be cothinkers,
otherwise they think past Heidegger's question and the experience that
set his thinking in motion.
The event would be the decision against the predominance of metaphysics
in which beyng was only experienced as the being of entities. Beyng itself
went under after shining up briefly in the first beginning (GA65:236) and
did not find its way into an enduring language of thought. Thinking is
first consolidated in Plato and Aristotle who proceed from the entity as
such and never leave it and therefore can only think beyng as beingness.
Entities dominate everywhere in metaphysics, they are the arché
that still rules today. The decision in favour of the event would mean
a certain turning away from entities. This would mean above all that the
distress of Western history could not be turned away or fended off by technology
but
also that there would be no search to turn away and fend off distress by
means of technology. Technology would even lose its dominion as that which
puts everything and holds everything, humans and things, in motion.
Heidegger himself is by no means certain that the event will come to pass.
Even though he is prophetic, he is a prophet on recall. Everything he writes
on the event and the decision must be couched in the subjunctive.
Whether humankind can cope with both, to endure the chiming of the
event as refusal and the performance of the transition to founding the
freedom of entities as such, to the renewal of the world through saving
the earth, who could decide and know that? (GA65:412)
and
The voice of the people speaks seldom and only through few, and whether
it can still be brought to resonance is uncertain. (GA65:319)
But at the same time, Heidegger has decided in favour of the other beginning,
a circumstance that can only be conceived of as faith: "This faith is rather
persistence in the most extreme decision." (GA65:370) Heidegger is a persistent
thinker, he persists in the transition, even though it could be the case
"that the other beginning too can only hold on to the event and to protect
it as clearing in a single flash, just as in the first beginning only phusis
came into the gathering (logos), scarcely and that for only a moment."
(GA65:236) The other beginning can thus go awry just as the first beginning
did.
But not only that: persisting and waiting in the transition to the other
beginning can not expect that the abandonment by being will be abandoned.
For this reason, Heidegger's thinking is borne by an uncertain presentiment.
Knowledge about the other beginning is not a certainty because the advent
of beyng cannot be known but only surmised. Whereas in the first beginning
the basic mood was astonishment, in the other beginning it is presentiment.
(GA65:20) This presentiment is not inferior to knowledge that reveals;
quite the contrary: the thinking of being moves within a completely different
essencing of truth in which concealedness, withdrawal, refusal and withholding
are essential. Concealment even has priority over revelation, a circumstance
that is unbearable for a metaphysical attitude, for since ancient times
truth has always been a happening of revelation in which entities as such
unveil themselves. More than any other thinker previously, Heidegger thinks
from within basic moods which he designates as historical and as nonpsychological.
Heidegger found himself in the decision in favour of the most extreme gamble
on the transition to the other beginning. For him, selfhood exists only
in persisting in the there as the clearing for the self-concealment and
refusal of beyng. Authenticity, which in Being and Time could still
be misinterpreted anthropologically, is experienced and interpreted after
the turning without further ado as appropriation into the event, so that
selfhood now can only be regarded as property of the event. This is of
course far removed from any psychological understanding of selfhood. Selfhood
exists only in the gamble on the transition as founding the there. But
what does founding the there mean?
The there is located where human being belongs after being released from
the metaphysical determination of human being as to zoion logon echon
and variations of this. It is the between where, according to Heidegger,
humankind and the gods encounter each other, where they are appropriated
to each other in the event.
According to Heidegger, art has a decisive role to play in founding
the there. For him, there is only a single artist, a poet namely, called
Hölderlin.
3. Hölderlin and the other beginning
In the Contributions to Philosophy, Hölderlin crops up repeatedly,
at first at the start of the text and then in more detail in the last section,
Beyng.
Hölderlin is not the subject of investigation here but is named in
a more casual way as the crucial point of reference for Heidegger's thinking.
A couple of years previously (1934/35), Heidegger gave an extensive series
of lectures on Hölderlin which has to be understood as the background
to the references in the Contributions.
The first remarks in the Contributions on Hölderlin concern
the relationship of thinking to poetizing, as if the poet had an easier
lot than the thinker. Heidegger thinks about what Hölderlin has poetized
before him.
How could thinking succeed where the poet, Hölderlin, has previously
failed? (GA65:12)
The poet conceals the truth more easily than others do in the image
and donates it thus to the gaze for preservation. (GA65:19)
At the beginning of the Contributions, the task of thinking is measured
against Hölderlin's poetry. His poetry has a head start over thinking
because it reaches out farthest into the future. For Heidegger, Hölderlin
is the poet of the transition who only becomes an historical necessity
as a poet today. In a section (GA65:62) that deals with the abandonment
by being and its overcoming in a series of theses and questions, Hölderlin's
name appears in the eighth and last thesis:
8. Why does Hölderlin's poetry only become adventist and thus
historical for this transition? (GA65:129)
For Heidegger, the future bears the name of Hölderlin. As the one
who has poetized farthest into the future, Hölderlin points the way
into the future, conjuring up the divine of an other beginning. Not only
does the profoundness of the suffering through of abandonment by being
count, but above all the presentiment of the future, which has to be advent
of the gods, even if this advent may be a passing by at a distance.
105. Hölderlin - Kierkegaard - Nietzsche
Nobody should today be so presumptuous as to regard as merely fortuitous
that these three men, who last of all have suffered most profoundly through
the uprootedness that has drifted toward Western history and who at the
same time had a most intimate presentiment of their gods, had to leave
the brightness of their daylight prematurely. What is being prepared? What
is the significance of the fact that the earliest of these three,
Hölderlin, became at the same time the one who poetized farthest
into the future in an age where thinking strove once more to know the
entire previous course of history absolutely? (GA65:204)
Thus, for Heidegger, Hölderlin is one who points the way out of abandonment
by being. He is not only someone who points the way, but he is the
one who points the way. For this reason, he can be "our necessity":
To what extent is the poet, Hölderlin, who has already gone ahead,
our necessity only now in his unique poetizing and oeuvre? (GA65:353)
For those to come, who prepare the founding of being-there, Hölderlin
has a unique status because he is the one most removed into the future
and thus lays the poetic groundwork for a metamorphosis of humankind.
Hölderlin their [the adventists'] poet coming from afar and thus
future poet. Hölderlin is the most adventist because he comes from
farthest and, in this farness, measures through what is greatest
and transforms it. (GA65:401)
Thinking thus has the task of creating an auditorium for Hölderlin's
word.
Accordingly, philosophy is now at first preparation of philosophy in
the manner of building the first forecourts in whose space Hölderlin's
word will become audible, answered by being-there and in such an
answer grounded as the language of future humankind. Only in this way does
humankind step onto the next slow catwalk toward beyng. Hölderlin's
uniqueness in the history of being must be grounded beforehand and all
comparisons in the history of poetry and literature, all 'aesthetic' judgments
and enjoyment, all 'political' evaluation must be overcome so that the
moments of the 'creators' have their 'hour'. [...] The historical determination
of philosophy comes to a climax in recognizing the necessity of creating
a hearing for Hölderlin's word. (GA65:421f)
If Heidegger otherwise has it out with the great figures of philosophy,
these efforts aim at working out the various missive destinies of the being
of entities in the course of the history of metaphysics, and that with
a destructive intention, i.e. in order to overcome metaphysics historically.
The philosophers in the history of metaphysics are not future figures,
but foregone figures belonging to the first beginning. Only Hölderlin,
according to Heidegger, points beyond metaphysical destiny. For Heidegger
he is therefore the only poet and the only artist; only he puts the truth
of the other beginning to work in the work. Hölderlin is the origin
of Heidegger's references to a non-Christian god and the encounter of gods
and humans in the event, one of the axes on the foursome, which play such
a prominent role in Heidegger's late thinking. Only through Hölderlin
does Heidegger come to a positive casting of the other beginning, even
if this casting necessarily remains a presentiment.
Truth, that clearing of self-concealment, / in whose open space the
gods and humans are appropriated to their encounter, itself opens beyng
as history which perhaps we have to think if we are to prepare the space
that Hölderlin's word, which again names the gods and humans, has
to preserve in resonance for its time, so that those basic moods are made
to resonate which tune a future humankind into guardianship of the duress
of the gods. (GA65:422f)
Hölderlin's greatness derives from his status as demigod who poetizes
the gods.
Because here a greatness of thinking existence is coerced by beyng
itself, whose contours we can scarcely surmise from Hölderlin's poetic
existence and from Nietzsche's ghastly wanderings, because in the space
of the thinking of the history of being only this is greatness, for which
reason talk of greatness remains too small, therefore, the preparation
of such thinkers must gather together every last vestige of unrelentingness
and move within the clearest of distinctions. (GAA65)
The decision that Heidegger poses as the decision between history or the
lack of it is at the same time the decision as to the advent or turning
away of the last god, a figure poetized in Hölderlin's poetry.
That Hölderlin poetizes the future poet, that he himself 'is'
as the first of them, who poses the decision as to the nearness or farness
of foregone and future gods. (GA65:463)
Hölderlin is Heidegger's only artist. For him, however, the artist
is a poet who moves in the medium of language and poetizes the history
of a people in advance by naming its gods in a myth. In Heidegger's eyes,
Hölderlin, as founder of the myth that founds history, is Germany's
Homer. Hölderlin thus stands out as a great figure among great figures
who manages the leap into the other beginning in a single bound.
The leap into beyng and its truth is already demanded here, the experience
that under the name of Hölderlin that unique putting-to-a-decision
happens; I say happens, not happened. We can try to put this 'event' into
relief historically in its uniqueness by viewing it in the midst of what
still is history to date in its highest potency and its richest unfolding:
in the midst of the metaphysics of German idealism and in the midst of
Goethe's forming of the world-picture, in the midst of that which is separated
from Hölderlin by a gulf (in 'romanticism'), even if it 'influenced'
him, the bearer of the name, historically, but not the guardian of beyng.
But what is achieved by setting Hölderlin into relief? It achieves
at the most only a new misunderstanding, as if Hölderlin were something
'unique' within that history of metaphysics and art; whereas it is not
a matter of 'within' and also not a matter of 'outside' as an exception.
Rather, it is a matter of the underivable thrust of beyng itself to be
caught in its purest facticity, that now and since that time that decision
is posed in the history of the Occident, no matter whether it is or can
be taken to notice by the still enduring age or not. (GA65:464)
At the end of the Contributions, which are nothing other than a
questioning of the truth of beyng, Heidegger asks surprisingly once more
as to a justification of such questioning. Hölderlin is again Heidegger's
authority and that not only as an authority among others, but as the sole
support for the thinking of beyng. The first indication of the other beginning
was thrust toward Hölderlin's poetry in a time when Hegel casts a
grand retrospective view over the history of philosophy from a summit.
Among other things, Hölderlin decisively determines Heidegger's thinking
on art and the work of art.
On what is the conjecture that the thrust of beyng has already thrown
a first shock into our history supported in the midst of all the insupportability
of such questioning of the truth of beyng? Again it is supported by a single
circumstance: that Hölderlin had to become that sayer who he is. (GA65:485)
After all that has been said, to think that Hölderlin has the position
of a key figure for Heidegger would be much too weakly put. Hölderlin,
the poet poetizing in advance, bears an enormous weight in the thinking
of beyng as the caster of the advent or final flight of the gods. Today,
this all seems quite astonishing. What should one think about the talk
of gods? Some are all too eager to stick the label 'mystic rumblings' on
it. Is this nothing other than the narration of some phantastic myth? Is
it convincing that Heidegger views Hölderlin as separated from romanticism
"by a gulf"? How so? Has Heidegger here undertaken a violent interpretation,
i.e. reinterpretation, of Hölderlin to press him into the mould of
thinking of the history of beyng? If a gulf is supposed to separate Hölderlin
from romanticism, this could only be the case if Hölderlin does not
poetize from the subjectity of the subject, but somehow has a presentiment
of the openness of being-there and thus poetizes it in advance, for only
then would the talk of the "thrust of beyng" have any sense. Does Heidegger
succeed in making a convincing connection between Hölderlin's poetry
and the casting of human being as being-there in his Hölderlin lectures?
Heidegger sees the gulf that separates Hölderlin from romanticism,
among other things, in the fact that Hölderlin's poetry is nourished
to a significant extent by Heraclitean thoughts. Heidegger interprets one
of Hölderlin's essential words, "innerness" as the taut, resisting
unity of the Heraclitean tension of the bow (Frag. 51):
For Hölderlin, this word [innerness] is the foundational metaphysical
word and thus far removed from any romantic sentimentality... (GA39:249)
Heidegger thinks to the German people as addressee. For him, Hölderlin
is the destiny of the German people that decides whether the Germans will
find their historical place in the other beginning or not. Only because
the German people was his addressee was Heidegger able to commit himself
to National Socialism and attempt to steer the "movement" into a 'more
authentic' direction. For Heidegger in the thirties and forties, German
being is sandwiched between Americanism and Bolshevism, both of which represent
variants of technicism unleashed and are thus exposed irredeemably to abandonment
by beyng. If at all, then it remains the privilege of German being to save
the Western world. Which makes the suspicion plausible that Heidegger became
victim of a blind 'patriotism' bearing essential characteristics of romanticism.
It is blind insofar as it prevents him from seeing the complicity of his
own thinking with the disaster of National Socialism(8)
as well as from uncovering his deep-seated prejudices, especially against
the Anglo-American world. As far as the latter is concerned, consider for
example the following passages from Heidegger's lectures in the forties:
'Bringing to a fall' is now going-behind, the 'trick', a word which
is not only fortuitously adopted from the 'English'. (GA54:60)
What does the Sybilline reference to the English language mean, which is
an addition put into scare quotes? Apart from the fact that 'trick' could
also be regarded as a French word. The Parmenides lecture cited here is
from the winter of 1942/43 during the war in which the English are 'the
enemy'. More remarkable and unsettling is a passage from the Hölderlin
lectures of Summer Semester 1942 in which the entry of the United States
into the war is commented on:
Today we know that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism is resolved
to annihilate Europe, that is, the homeland, and that means the beginning
of Western civilization. The beginning is indestructible. The entry of
America into this planetary war is not an entry in history but is already
the last American act of American historylessness and self-devastation.
For this act is the refusal of the beginning and the decision in favour
of what has no beginning. The hidden spirit of the beginning in the Western
world will not even have a contemptuous look for this process of self-devastation
but will await its historic hour in the calm collectedness (Gelassenheit)
of the beginning. (GA 53:68)
Heroic words! And at the same time a commentary from the history of being
on a concrete historical event (which sounds however more like a forceful
act of desperation): the entry of the United States into the war. The word
decision is used, and that as the decision of the Americans in favour of
what has no beginning. This decision makes the Americans in Heidegger's
eyes into the metaphysical enemies of the other beginning, which however
is supposed to be indestructible and can wait serenely in the wings for
its historic moment. In 1942 still, Germany is for Heidegger the homeland
and the representative of the beginning of Western civilization. In 1942
still, Heidegger's identification with National Socialism is sufficient
for him to be able to square a German victory in the Second World War with
a decision in favour of the other beginning. The American decision,
by contrast, is for Heidegger in the last instance futile, since the beginning
is indestructible, whereas a German victory would mean a genuine decision
in favour of the homeland and Western civilization. Supposing that the
Germans had been victorious, would the annihilation of the Jews have been
part of the decision in favour of the other beginning and the homeland?
Would it have been an acceptable price for achieving an other historical
greatness?
Whoever affirmed National Socialism also affirmed Auschwitz (no matter
whether he knew about it already during the war or not; and it was impossible,
even well before the outbreak of war, to have known nothing), for the theory
of race and antisemitism are part of its essence and were part of the party's
program from the very beginning. How did Heidegger want to draw a line
in this respect? It is not sufficient to have only wanted to save and reshape
the German university out of the entire complex, to want to "renew it out
of its essential ground" (9) when
this German university had already begun in 1933 to banish its Jewish lecturers.
How did Heidegger intend to remove the murderous elements from the program,
to say nothing about his moral evasion?(10)
Is it not properly speaking the German spirit that dissolved in the smoke
of the stacks of Auschwitz? Is the genocide of the Jews at the same time
the suicide of the Germans historically? Does Heidegger have a presentiment
of this when he refers at the conclusion of his self-justificatory text
to the Germans "after the catastrophe has broken on top of them"?(11)
If the Germans annihilate and devastate themselves historically, does it
still make any sense to speak of an other Western beginning? Did Western
history consume itself in the attempted eradication of its Semitic other?
And so: far from being indestructible, the beginning would have destroyed
itself so that the planet only endures in the twilight of American giganticism
after the decision against history. Heidegger's heroic words always arouse
suspicion because they always smell of violence. The other beginning, "standing
in the indestructible" (GA 53:68) demands sacrifice because the indestructible
and devastation belong together, "just as the valley and the mountain"
(ibid.) belong together. The Germans first have to go through devastation
to arrive at the other beginning:
Could however such [being-able-to-wait for the other beginning] ever
happen without the historical human breed of this beginning first becoming
mature for the beginning as its own through the pain of its sacrifice?
(ibid.)
Who can still read about sacrifice and becoming mature after Auschwitz
without being appalled? In Heidegger's eyes, the Germans must first be
hardened and disciplined for the other beginning so that they can take
on their great historical mission.
4. Heidegger's Hölderlin Winter Semester 1934/35
Two years before writing the Contributions and after his resignation
as Rector, Heidegger holds his first Hölderlin lectures at the University
of Freiburg in which it becomes clear what Heidegger's thinking imposes
on this German poet, namely, the founding of "that history which commences
with the struggle around the decision concerning advent or flight of the
god".(12) Is Hölderlin thus
to be understood as the founder of a new religion, as a poetizing prophet?
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe interprets Heidegger's use of Hölderlin as
the attempt "to take the step beyond rigourous questioning or beyond the
mere announcement of an 'other thinking' and to sketch the first lines
of this 'other thinking'".(13)
According to Lacoue-Labarthe, "Heidegger fails insofar as he does what
he expressly warns Jünger against doing: 'crossing the line'". (ibid.
p.31) This crossing amounts to founding a "new mythology":
At the same time, the foursome and the 'want of holy names', the ring
and the light ring and the four, waiting for the new god and other similar
motifs constitute a mythology in the philosophical meaning of the word,
that is, a mythology without revealing (apocalypse) the name or viewing
the location. (ibid. p.33)
Does Heidegger really cross the 'line' in casting the foursome by building
on Hölderlin's preceding poetry? With his observations about a mythology,
Lacoue-Labarthe does not, however, want to initiate a critique of Heidegger,
for "from what locus could one 'criticize' Heidegger?" (ibid.) Rather,
Lacoue-Labarthe speaks of an "infinite mistrust" "because of Heidegger's
political stance".(ibid. p.34 GA65:353) "The altercation must turn
on this point." (ibid.) This political stance must, however, be
translated into the dimension of thinking because the only thing that can
interest us about Heidegger is his thinking.
An alternative to this Lacoue-Labarthean strategy is to put Heidegger's
understanding of art into question, a strategy which is tried out in the
present text. For Heidegger art has only an historical meaning. But Heidegger's
"political stance" can also be explained from this, since for him art as
poetry founds the polis.
The Hölderlin lectures of 1934/35 makes the poet into the German Homer.
Not in the least can one speak of a "weak Messianic force" (Benjamin) for
what Heidegger wants to make of Hölderlin.
Historical human existence is borne and guided from the foundation
by beyng which the poet has experienced in advance, veiled in the word
and placed in the people in this way. We grasp this happening in a single
phrase by saying: The poet founds beyng: This founding of beyng was carried
out for Western existence in Homer whom Hölderlin calls the 'poet
of all poets'. (GA39:184)
Essential elements of Heidegger's interpretation of Hölderlin must
now be drawn into an altercation that ultimately should make Heidegger's
understanding of the other beginning as a mobilization of the German people
into its historical destiny questionable.
It is easy to ascertain who Hölderlin is for Heidegger: "poet of the
Germans" (GA39:214) corresponding to Homer as the "poet of all poets" and
founder of the historical existence of the Greek people. Heidegger adopts
unquestioningly a model of historical founding from the Greeks which envisages
three steps in historical time:
This originary, historical time of the peoples is therefore the time
of the poets, thinkers and creators of states, i.e. of those who properly
found and reinforce the historical existence of a people. They are the
creative ones in the proper sense. (GA39:51)
The time of the creative ones and the people is riddled by fiords,...
(GA39:52)
The originary time is not a smooth passing by of moments but is "riddled
by fiords" which are the respective epochs founded by the "creative ones".
The creative ones, in turn, are the "poets, thinkers and creative state
founders":
This beyng however is founded poetically, structured by thinking and
put into knowledge, and in the deeds of the state's founder rooted in the
earth and the historical space. This historical beyng of the people, the
fatherland, is sealed in secrecy by its very essence and forever. (GA39:120)
The creative ones found "the fatherland" lying hidden in the "secret" of
beyng. The poets are the first ones to thus forge the fatherland of a people
by compelling their historical destiny into the "rigour of saying". (GA39:273)
For Heidegger, this is "the Greek-German mission". (GA39:151) to retrieve
and repeat the Greek beginning by founding the German fatherland. The 'other
beginning' is nothing other than this. In the retrieving repetition, however,
the status of thinking is raised or at least strengthened, for:
Western historical existence is ineluctably and ineradicably a knowing
existence. ... Because our existence is knowing, ... for us there is no
longer any purely poetical becoming of existence, just as little as there
is a purely thinking becoming, but also just as little as there is a solely
activist becoming. It is demanded of us not only to erect suitable and
continual compensating connections between the poetical, thinking and active
powers but to take their hidden, summit-like isolation seriously... (GA39:184)
Just as Sophocles' poetry achieves a "founding of Greek existence in its
entirety ... in the face of the gods" (GA39:216), so too should Hölderlin
take on this role for the Germans so that they can "stand on solid ground"
(ibid.): "this living is founded in and through poetry, i.e. it
is 'poetical'". (ibid.)
It is a matter of the genuine appearance or nonappearance of the god
in the being of the people out of the distress of beyng and for beyng.
This appearance must become a fundamental happening. (GA39:147)
Poetry as founder of steadfast living, rooted in the soil of the fatherland,
also prepares the divine for the people:
The poet compels and banishes the flashes of the god into the word
and puts this lightning-charged word into the language of his people. (GA39:30)
In this way
through the arrival of the new gods a new course is to be allotted
to the entire historical, earthly existence of the Germans and a new determinacy
created. (GA39:93)
The poets are translators of the language of the gods:
... and since ancient times, winks are the language of the gods. Poetry
is the transitive winking of these winks into the people,... (GA39:32)
In this lecture series, a great deal of Heidegger's thinking about history,
art, language, the gods, among other things becomes more concrete and clearer.
In particular, the obscure phrase concerning the "passing by of the last
god" from the Contributions achieves greater clarity:
The transience of the eternal is not for nothing, but rather precisely
passing by is the way in which the gods are present, the ephemerality of
a scarcely comprehensible wink that in the instant of passing by can show
every degree of bliss and terror. (GA39:111)
The gods are present in passing by; they wink "scarcely comprehensible"
and move on. The beyng of the gods is an "ephemerality" which is scarcely
there. Their ephemerality, in being winked on further, is supposed to open
up an historical course, place a people before a decision and thus found
a steadfast living of the people in its soil.
But how is the poetical language that relays winks supposed to open up
such an historical possibility? Heidegger is very clear on this point:
the poet awakens a basic mood in the people which is always an opening
up of world. The temporal manifestation of "originary time" (GA39:109)
is the "basic happening of mood" (ibid.). The particular basic mood
that was to be awakened by Hölderlin's poetry is the mood of "holy
mournful, compliant tribulation":
To decide in favour of the proper time of poetry means however: to
enter into the basic mood of holy mournful, compliant tribulation. Since
such a mood cannot be brought about violently and artificially without
any conditions, we must pose ourselves before the decision whether we want
to participate in creating the presuppositions for such an experience or
whether we want to work against it, even if only through indifference and
perplexity. The decision proper in favour of or against shifting into the
basic mood of poetry presupposes that we are strong enough to experience
distress, from which tribulation and preparedness will first rise up. (GA39:112f)
The people must be "strong enough" to look into the eyes of the distress
of distresslessness and thus to feel a mournfulness. The poet too must
be strong enough, for:
The basic mood itself must however first be awakened. For this struggle
of changing mood in the moods that predominate in each situation and linger
on, the firstborn have to be sacrificed. These are those poets who speak
out in advance the future beyng of a people in its history and are necessarily
overheard in doing so. Hölderlin is such a poet. The basic mood of
holy mournful, but compliant tribulation awakened in his late and most
mature poetry founds the metaphysical locus of our future historical beyng
still struggling for a determination of its greatness. With this, our historical
existence is put into the highest distress and a decision that lies far
before and above the question whether Christianity will prevail or not...
(GA39:112f)
The poet makes history by compelling an historical destiny into language.
Hölderlin, Sophocles, Homer found an historical temporal space with
their language, which puts a world up for decision.
The opening revelation of entities happens in language, not only a
recapitulatory expression of what is revealed but the originary revelation
itself, and precisely therefore concealment too and its predominant distortion,
illusion.
... Only where there is language does world prevail. Only where world,
i.e. where language [prevails], is there the most pressing danger, danger
at all, i.e. the threat to being as such posed by nonbeing. (GA39:62)
Only the poetic power of language is able to open up an historical world.
It does this by awakening a basic mood in the people and leaving "the unsayable
unsaid" (GA39:119) in saying. Heidegger takes his essential concept of
language as such from poetic language. Everyday language, communication,
statements are for Heidegger not language in a primary sense, but poetry
as the "originary language of a people" (GA39:64) is, compared to which
language in the conventional sense as understood by theories of language
and in linguistics is only an insipid dilution. But where does this priority
of language come from, even if it be a priority of poetic language? This
question becomes even more urgent considering the fact that originary poetical
language that founds history is supposed to primarily awaken a basic mood.
Can a basic mood eventuate or be awakened originarily only in (poetic)
language? If the basic mood is supposed to call an opening of beyng and
entities in their totality into temporal being, then, according to Heidegger,
only language is able to unlock an historical world. How so? Is world only
where language is? For Heidegger, language is and will remain "the house
of being" (letter on humanism).
And what is this poetic language supposed to say in 1934/35 when it founds
an historical world? This is expounded especially in the second part of
the lecture series, which treats the hymn entitled The Rhine. Hölderlin
poetized the "demigod", the Rhine, who is supposed to powerfully found
the fatherland, for the river is "primordially overflowing will" (GA39:265);
the will of the demigod is "superwill" (GA39:208). In the founding, everything
proceeds from the will and toward the will of the people for "an historical
people is a people as community only when it knows, and that means wills
that community can only be an historical community when those others risk
and consummate their being-other as the others." (GA39:284) The poet as
the other puts his language in the midst of the people so that it can know
what it wills and wants. The superwill of the river that wills the fatherland
springs from mother earth as "the closedness of the womb that allows submergence"
(GA39:242) and also from the "ray of light" (ibid.) of the divine
lightning flash, in the Greek manner. The "excessive fullness of a great
willing" (GA39:243) has to be "compelled toward a figurative forming" (ibid.)
which is called "putting the truth to work in the work", originary energy,
in the lectures on the origin of the art work. This overflowing will is
what pushed Heidegger in the direction of National Socialism and holds
him fettered until the end of the war.
5. Recapitulation
The "Greek-German mission" (GA39:151) is supposed to be realized according
to the three-step model of the poet-thinker-statefounder. Hölderlin
comes forward here as "proclaimer and caller for those concerned who themselves
are engaged in a vocation as constructors constructing the world". (GA39:221)
Even after the war, the interrelationship between building and poetizing
is maintained - cf. e.g. '...humankind lives poetically...' in Vorträge
und Aufsätze (1954). The thinkers have the role in this enterprise
of moulding "poetry into the hardness and determinacy of thoughtful-questioning
knowledge" (GA39:221). It is evident that this cannot happen without struggle
and strife because poetry "as founding act is nothing other than the noise
of armed nature itself, beyng, which brings itself to itself in the word."
(GA39:257) Thus does Heidegger translate the thought contained in the Heraclitean
polemos-fragment into German. The predominance of the will as superwill
is the hinge that connects Heidegger's thinking, which dreams of a great
historical task of the German people, intimately with National Socialism.
That after the disaster of the collapse of Germany's attempted conquest
and especially after the revelation of the horror in the death camps this
dream has been irrevocably dreamt to nothing has been visible for a long
time.
Any striving for greatness and unification, especially national greatness,
is more than suspect today. Any strong thinking that promises a new beginning,
a tabula rasa smells of totalitarianism and violence and murder.
Strength and greatness have become categories that are more than questionable.
The way Heidegger worked through the disaster of National Socialism consisted
mainly in turning away from the will, which characterizes and marks his
thinking after the end of the war, even if the will to a national historical
greatness rooted in the German soil is never completely extinguished. Talk
of being saved by a god, which only makes sense on the foil of the Hölderlin
lectures of 1934/35 and the Contributions, is retained even in the
late Spiegel Interview of 1966. Thinking waits still for a great
future which it is preparing. The advent of the other beginning founded
by the Germans is only postponed to a far off, indefinite future.
If Heidegger supports himself in the Contributions solely on Hölderlin,
and if his nationalist interpretation of art under the leadership of poetry
has to appear extremely questionable today, then everything surrounding
Heidegger's thinking opens up once again. When Heidegger maintains in the
Spiegel
interview that he "does not see what is pioneering in modern art",
this has to do essentially with his understanding of art bearing Hölderlin's
stamp. If the "national element" disappears from Heidegger's writings after
the war, this does not mean that everything has now been extended from
the German to a planetary scale and that the specific German element could
be forgotten. Rather, Heidegger's thinking about art, poetry, language,
the other beginning and essentially the will has to be put into question.
The retraction of the strong will in Heidegger's post-war writings is indeed
striking, after it had characterized his stance during the regime of National
Socialism. The transitional text to this altered stance is
On Locating
Letting-be from 1944/45, in which thinking turns away from will and
toward waiting. However, elements of Hölderlin are retained in the
casting of the foursome.
On an appropriate occasion it will prove worthwhile to investigate the
text on letting-be, especially with respect to Heidegger's attempt to come
to terms with the German defeat that is becoming apparent. The disaster
of National Socialism probably broke Heidegger's will, not in a psychological
sense, but in an essential, philosophical sense. Now, however, we should
risk a leap across the Atlantic to New York in the fifties to find out
what modern art was doing at that time. Heidegger, of course, did not see
what was "pioneering" in this new art, which is not surprising in view
of what has in the meantime come to light about Heidegger's interpretation
of Hölderlin. The leading form of art in the New York art scene of
the fifties was not poetry but initially painting, which then irradiated
fundamental, powerful effects onto music, mediated above all by the composers
John Cage, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff.
6. The New York Fifties
Change of continent, change of perspective, change of language, change
of world. The contrast between the Black Forest of south-western Germany
and New York City could hardly be greater. With his deep-seated rejection
and disdain of Americanism, the world of art and music in the NYC of the
fifties was not open to Heidegger. In America there are no thinkers in
the sense that there have been Denker in Germany, but after the war that
drove so many European intellectuals and artists to the United States,
there was a burgeoning art and music scene with its centre in New York.
Something happened in New York after the war, as if Europe had given up
its ghost, or passed on its spirit, its Geist, to the other continent.
The German spirit had committed suicide, or had at least gone into metempsychosis.
Cage and Feldman were deeply influenced by the European imports, but more
directly by the transformation that art went through at the hands of Jackson
Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists, a transformation in which
American art stepped out of the shadow of European painting once and for
all and came into its own with a vengeance. Painting was at this time the
avant garde for music, and music learnt the lesson that it now had to do
without language, without meaning, without a literary underpinning. Music
ceased telling stories as it went along, thus breaking also with Schoenberg,
who had brought the German musical tradition with him to the United States.
Schoenberg's twelve tone system, according to his intentions, allowed a
continuation of the great German tradition, maintaining its rootedness
in meaning and a text. Instead of this reliance on an anchorage in language
and a theory, Cage and Feldman (together with Earle Brown and Christian
Wolff) broke with the theoretical systems that held dominion over the tones
and took the very first steps to allow sounds as sounds to happen. Sounds
as sounds means that they are no longer ordered in a harmonic, atonal,
twelve tone or any other system nor are they transporters of meaning articulated
elsewhere in a poetical text but rather they are allowed to happen just
as they are, each sound for itself, or even each noise for itself. It is
the diaspora of sounds as an act of liberation, the exodus of sounds from
the bondage of harmonic and other systems. They find their way into dissemination.
An explosion, a catastrophe takes place in the fifties, a catastrophe that
ejects music into a hitherto unknown freedom with unfathomable possibilities.
This act of liberation is on one level tied to a program and given an historical
mission with Cage (and Wolff too) trying to build bridges between music
and social change. Feldman, by contrast, does not, but is content with
being purely a composer.
What does this tell us about Heidegger? There is a lot to say, some of
it showing up the gulf that exists between Heidegger's conception of art
on the one hand and Cage's (and Feldman's) on the other, but some of it
showing a deep affinity, signalled by the terms letting-be and the apophantic
as. There is also some indication that Cage's art has opened up another
historical world, thus echoing lines from Heidegger's lectures on the Origin
of the Work of Art, but in a way that would have been unrecognizable
to the latter. Heidegger and Cage share also a naive view of politics resulting
from short-circuited translations of their respective thinking and art
onto the level of politics. (This will be elaborated on later, albeit only
with respect to Cage.)
The phrases 'sounds as sounds' and 'noise as noise' already have a Heideggerian
ring about them. Like no other, Heidegger showed how metaphysics hangs
on a small conjunctive word, as. He characterizes the openness of Dasein
for the world as being able to understand beings as beings, to on heh
on. The apophantic as is the ontological difference, the between in
which world happens for Dasein. For Heidegger, this as is the origin of
language. Being lays claim on Dasein. Exposed or thrown into the openness
of the apophantic as, Dasein is compelled to respond. This response is
language, even if Dasein says nothing. Merely being open to sounds as sounds
is already being within language in Heideggerian terms. That would mean
that hearing is the originary experience of language. Dasein is able to
hear entities as such and is thus in the world. The originary language
of sound does not, however, have to carry a message, it does not have to
mean anything. This is where Heidegger and Cage part ways, because Heidegger
ties sound back to language in the sense of words and more especially to
words in the sense of his sketch of the foursome of world. Otherwise, Heidegger
would not have been able to make poetry into the hegemonic artform that
opens up and founds a world.
This tying back to language takes place in another context even as early
as Being and Time, when Heidegger insists that the sound heard is
always already the sound of something, say, the sound of the motor bike
passing by, the wind in the trees, the door slamming, etc. But then sounds
would always mean something. The sound of the oboe may be experienced as
the sound of the oboe, but that's the end of the matter: this sound does
not have to mean anything by, for example, evoking a specific emotion or
having a part to play in a musical development. Heidegger's intention was,
rightly, to prevent the physicalistic reduction of sound to composite waves
of certain frequencies that vibrate in air, but the implications are more
far-reaching. The sound of music for Heidegger can only be music in a world
that has already been opened up and established by poetic language. Cage
et
al do without this crutch. For them, sounds come and go without having
to refer to anything but themselves. They do not need to be rooted or located
in a text or in an overarching musical system.
Thus it is not fortuitous that Cage and Feldman were inspired by the abstract
expressionist painters who themselves had accomplished a reduction of painting
by emptying it of meaning. The colour on the canvas does not have to represent
anything anymore. It is not a symbol, nor does it represent an object mimetically,
nor is there any other reference to an exterior meaning. A kind of clearing
of the board takes place with the New York painters of the fifties. Now
they start again from scratch with the basics: paint on canvas. Colour
as colour comes to be seen. This nihilistic, reductionist movement is neither
resignative nor absurdist. It is rather throwing metaphysical ballast overboard
to allow colour as colour to emerge. The nakedness of the colour is overwhelming
and highly reserved at one and the same time. It shocks and shows discretion
with one and the same gesture. There is nothing to see, but the mood is
overpowering. Consider, for example, Rothko's hovering, shimmering patches
of colour which are transcendental only in showing colour as colour. Interpreting
these patches of transcendental colour as sublime and divine only does
violence to them. They are what they are. The apophantic as is the originary
transcendence that calls us into the there; it is not a beyond.
The same thing happens with Cage's and Feldman's and Wolff's music. There
is nothing to hear but the sounds themselves. There is no development,
no predictability, no beginning, no end. There is no introduction and no
finale. Nothing is expressed. The pieces are not there to provide a virtuoso
performer with an opportunity to shine. "Value judgments are not in the
nature of this work as regards either composition, performance, or listening."(14)
Cage and Feldman have no intention of leading the American people to their
historical mission, even though Cage, as we shall see below in more detail,
wants to improve the world. They have nothing to say, except perhaps: Happy
New Ears. Their music speaks of nothing. But this nothing is not nothing,
it is rich. There are strong overtones of agreement between Heidegger and
Cage/Feldman that are located in the theme of letting be (Sein-lassen,
Gelassenheit). Feldman talks about not "meddling with the material", not
"pushing the sounds around", to which his German interlocutor, Stockhausen,
replies "Not even a little bit?"(15)
It is no wonder that Cage became more famous than Feldman, for he wrote
and published more texts, and these are marked by a lucidity that allows
Cage's artistic intentions to be clearly understood. Feldman, on the other
hand, was more sparing in his writings and has a more cryptic style, often
spiced with anecdotes like some Zen teacher dropping koans. For a philosophical
evaluation of the so-called New York school, it is Cage who offers more
material to chew on. Texts on how specific pieces were composed do not
hold the main interest for a philosophical survey, which requires a wider
view. In the clarity of his conception and the radicality of his leap into
another kind of music, Cage is also the more pioneering figure. He outlines
a new kind of art as a whole, whereas Feldman remains pretty much a composer.
The exchange between Abraham Skulsky and Cage in the periodical Musical
America at the beginning of the fifties is an instructive example.
Cage rejects the terms of Skulsky's view of the composer's task as "achieving
ideals" or presenting a "new aesthetics". Against this, Cage sets the assertion:
"Art is a way of life. It is for all the world like taking a bus, picking
flowers, making love, sweeping the floor, getting bitten by a monkey, reading
a book, etc., ad infinitum".(16)
The Freiburg music historian, Hans-Heinrich Eggebrecht picked out just
this point as pivotal for having it out with Cage as a thinker and creative
artist. Eggebrecht questions the edict that there is no difference between
art and life in a radio program that was broadcast on German radio on 7
August 1994. To say that "art is a way of life" is one way of leaving the
traditional realm of aesthetics, which is concerned with the enjoyment
and appreciation of sensory perception. As we shall see below, Cage's art
ultimately dissolves art by questioning the foundations of techne.
The dictum that art is a way of life brings Cage into contact once again
with Heidegger, who, with other motives in mind, strove to break the vice-like
hold of philosophical aesthetics in his lectures on The Origin of the
Work of Art in the mid-thirties. The two alternatives to traditional
aesthetics show surprising similarities. Heidegger leaves the schema of
form and material or form and content for thinking about art works and
puts in its place the thought that a work of art opens up an historical
world in a struggle with the earth, that for its part leans towards concealedness
and inertia. What for Cage is a way of everyday life is for Heidegger an
historical world. No matter how these two terms are further interpreted,
both take leave of the work of art as an aesthetic experience, be
it that aesthetic means 'concerned with beauty', or be it that it is taken
in the original Greek sense of 'concerned with sensory perception'. Beauty
is inevitably a matter of taste and judgements about what is pleasant,
but now taste is got rid of as an arbiter of the success or failure of
a musical composition. "Normally the choice of sounds is determined by
what is pleasing and attractive to the ear: delight in the giving or receiving
of pain being an indication of sickness."(17)
Both Heidegger and Cage insist in different ways that the work of art be
useful, Cage by tying the art work back to life in learning to change oneself
in accepting things as they happen contingently, and Heidegger by putting
the work to work in prising open another historical world, conceived as
another uncovering of the being of beings, i.e. an alternative casting
of being.
Cage takes in the world of sounds and noises and declares them, without
distinction, to be music. No longer should the system of harmony in its
various forms and extensions, culminating in Schoenberg and then the serial
composers, be the form that reigns over and organizes the material of uniquely
defined, pitched tones. Cage thus proceeds in a direction diametrically
opposed to that of the serial composers Boulez and Stockhausen, who developed
a system for controlling not just pitch but rhythm, dynamics, stresses
and duration as well by means of mathematical permutations (see below).
Here there is no parallel to Heidegger's thinking about the art work in
the mid-thirties, but there is nevertheless an affinity to the later Heidegger,
who takes leave of the will as the essence of thinking towards the end
of the Second World War in his text Gelassenheit (Letting-be).
Cage, convinced that life is essentially non-intentional, also strives
to open up works of musical art to non-intentionality. This takes place
in two phases, the first, in which he uses chance operations to compose
a piece, paradigmatically represented by his Music of Changes (1951),
and the second, in which the musical work itself becomes indeterminate,
by allowing the performers to make choices and, more radically, by subjecting
the performance of the work itself to the vagaries of chance, so that the
work never sounds the same twice. The paradigmatic piece here would be
Imaginary
Landscape, a composition for twelve radios, in which what is playing
on the radio at various frequencies at the time of the performance is allowed
to become part of a piece of music heard by an audience. Many of Cage's
later pieces are set free for superimposition with other works, thus introducing
indeterminacy in the performance of them. The work of art, especially in
Imaginary
Landscape, becomes a net for catching contingent aural events. Music
becomes coincidence. In such a composition, all that is put together is
the radios, the frequencies and the volumes in a temporal frame together
with some instructions for using them. There is no melody, rhythm or harmony,
but there is something to listen to. Music is thus recast as listening
to what happens in a time-space frame. This recasting goes far beyond the
redefinition of an artform or the proposal of a new aesthetics.
In line with Cage's dictum recasting art as a form of life, the redefinition
of music implies a redefinition of life, i.e. ultimately a recasting of
who we are in everyday life. Human being becomes an openness to and for
what can be heard; its essence lies in listening rather that willing something.
An openness for the world precedes any acting in it. This is a long way
from the traditional metaphysical zoion logon echon and the zoion
politikon, both of which are premised upon a being with an ability,
namely, the natural light of reason, employing it to manipulate things
in accordance with the will. Both Heidegger and Cage, in very different
language, insist on the openness of human being for the world as the fundamental
event of being here, in contrast to the metaphysical castings of human
being as an animal with certain qualities and abilities to act on entities
in the world. Openness for the world precedes any questions of knowledge
(technology) or ethics, which always already presuppose, unthought, this
originary openness.
7. A contingent world, the world as contingency
The casting of the world that Cage offers with his thinking and music and
contributions to the other arts is that the world is what happens at random,
at haphazard, by chance. Contingency, accidentality, randomness, haphazard,
chance are words characterizing the new world we live in, the world that
carries on where modernity and the modern subject left off. Said negatively,
randomness is characterized by a lack of control, "having no definite aim
or purpose" (OED), being free from restraint, or positively: "made, done,
occurring at haphazard, by chance" (OED). Whereas "made" and "done" still
refer to an acting subject, "occur" is open to the happening of events
without special agency. Cage's casting of the world implies an abstaining
from restraint, a relinquishing of control over things. What is left is,
said in Zen terms, nothingness, or in Heideggerian terms, the truth of
the openness of being as such.
Cage's art and thinking can well be regarded as a response to the increasing
complexity of the world. He insists on art being useful for living in today's
world, which is characterized by complexity, itself in turn simply the
reverse side of the manipulative power unleashed by modern technology.
Complexity results from a network of independent nodes, whether they be
individuals, companies or institutions, interacting in no particular pattern.
There is no point in the network from which one could gain a bird's eye
view, no point at which its structure or meaning would become manifest,
not even for a god. No longer is it presupposed that there is some ultimate
subject for whom, in its infinite wisdom, everything made some sense, as
opposed to human understanding, which is finite. There is no longer any
maker assumed behind it all. Instead, the events occur simply at haphazard
and can be taken in as such by an attentive existence without concocting
explanations. The worldwide web of telecommunications currently being spun
aroung the globe, for example, is a loose-fitting knit that links only
to open possibilities, not to force necessities.
The relinquishment of control is one of the main threads going through
Cage's development as a composer from the late thirties to the sixties.
Starting in the late forties, he devises more and more ways to abscond
from the scene of the art work as composer-subject and to allow things
to happen. What infuriated and enraged audiences and musicians alike initially
was that everything dissolved into anarchy. (Witness, for example, the
premiere of his Piano Concerto on 19 September 1958 in Cologne, where the
audience interjected with noises of its own.) This was in fact Cage's aim:
to abolish the overarching principle, to depose the ruling prince, a corollary
of which was to depose the conductor. Without the system of harmony, there
was no yardstick against which to conveniently measure the tones heard.
At first it all sounded chaotic, a huge joke, and John Cage was simply
the clown. But Cage was quietly serious. In playing together, the musicians
act and interact as separate monads, each with his or her own line and
time. They play neither harmoniously nor disharmoniously because they play
outside of harmony. There is simply no longer any overarching system that
could be used to judge the sounds heard as an integrated whole. They remain
disparate, each one for itself, although interacting and coinciding with
other sounds in unpredictable and surprising ways. This becomes especially
apparent in the superimposed pieces, because there is no whole to start
with within which each performer would have an assigned part to play.
Cage's compositions differ from some other musical works in the second
half of the twentieth century which employ more and more complex mathematical
systems such as the superimposition of rhythms, microtonal intervals and
stochastic models. Neither in composing nor in performing does the composer
relinquish control over the sounds when composing by these methods. The
standards of virtuosity demanded of the performing musician(s) tend to
rise in parallel to the rising complexity. Not that Cage's compositions
do not place high demands on performers, even calling on virtuosity as
in, say, the Freeman Etudes for solo violin. For this piece, Cage
worked closely with the violinist Paul Zukowsky in finding out what was
still possible to be played on this demanding instrument. It was a matter
of translating celestial charts into notes and fingering playable on the
violin. But the demands placed on the performer are basically of a kind
other than virtuosity. They require the simplicity of devotion more than
brilliance. With the corset of harmony, the traditional occidental language
of the soul, having fallen away, the judgement of performers on the basis
of virtuosity also starts to swim. Expressiveness, in particular, loses
validity as a yardstick, since the sounds made are no longer expressions
of the musician's or the composer's soul. Pathos and feeling cease to be
criteria of musical judgement. Music is no longer a medium through which
the soul is moved emotively. Still less does it become a soulless field
of exercise for intellectual contortions, a charge more justly to be levelled
at serial music. The great difference between Cagean aleatoric and indeterminacy
procedures and modern composition techniques is that the latter proceed
from known systems and make them complexer to an ever-increasing extent,
so that there is always a fine thread of theoretical knowledge, no matter
how entwined, holding the whole composition together, whereas Cage employs
random procedures that ensure that one can never theoretically penetrate
the final musical event that is aurally experienced. The admission of chance
both in composition and performance not only overloads but actually cuts
off and relinquishes any possibilities of a theoretical grasp. It lets
the openness of opaqueness be. The musical work becomes in principle technically
non-understandable, incomprehensible. Said positively, Cage's music lets
the chaos of contingency be such. Contingency as contingency is
let be; there is no attempt to transmute contingency into explicability
by means of some chaos theory or other, as modern mathematics is wont to
do. It is precisely this admittance of incomprehension and allowance of
opacity that marks Cage off from his European counterparts, raising their
ire to a not inconsiderable degree. One can almost feel the hackles rising
in, say, Boulez' or Xenakis' sometimes condescending attitudes toward Cage's
music. These latter composers, remaining as they do strongly committed
to the European tradition of techne, can only regard Cage's iconoclasm
in the halls of occidental music as anathema.
Of all the Western arts, music (and architecture) have been the most mathematical,
and mathematics is the purest, most eternal form of Western knowledge,
the form of knowledge with the greatest degree of theoretical penetration
and thus control. Even today, mathematics is regarded as the language of
the secrets of the universe. Kant's insight into the interrogative nature
of modern science, which demands answers from nature in a certain (mathematical)
form, has still not caught up with modern scientists, who arrogantly regard
themselves as the possessors of the deepest arcane knowledge about nature's
mysteries. For the Greeks, mathematics, the theory of harmony and metaphysics
were very close together. The order of the universe, the movement of the
spheres has from time immemorial been thought of in terms of harmony and
mathematical proportions, i.e. rationality in the original sense. It is
not simply fortuitous that those philosophers who ushered in the modern
age, Descartes and Leibniz, were also eminent mathematicians. The mathematization
of time and space were great metaphysical castings of the world that opened
up and paved the way for the sciences to take control of and manipulate
things. Music partook of this progress and employed mathematical procedures
for its own ends in organizing its material. Thus, for example, the mathematical
theory of combinatorics, only developed relatively recently, is very much
at home in serial music. Chance can be allowed into music in a controlled
way via the theories of probability, statistical distributions and stochastic
processes. Chaos theory discovers order in disorder, thus winning possibilities
of control.
Pure aleatorics in the way Cage used it means relinquishing control, suspending
comprehension and allowing sounds to happen without asking why. Cage's
aleatorics are a leap into simplicity. Some European composers have since
taken up aleatoric methods but simultaneously subjected them to control
for the sake of a result that pleases their ears. Thus there is the "controlled
aleatorics" of Vitold Lutoslawski, but there are many others, starting
with Boulez, who put the shackles of taste and theoretical stringency back
onto contingency. Much of serial music sounds strained and constipated,
whereas Cage's works have a looseness of letting be and thus a beauty all
their own (albeit that beauty is not the point). Eric Salzman writes, for
instance, in a comparison of Cage's Variations IV with Stockhausen's
Hymnen:
The whole [of Variations IV] is casual (in both senses), multifaceted,
totally non-linear; it is, in part or in whole, a relaxed, totally engaging,
total, and even joyous experience. The Stockhausen, although its length
is presumably variable, is far more organized. It has a cutting edge like
a steel blade and a tense, nervous quality that never lets up. For all
that goes on, it has a curiously flat, one-dimensional surface, across
which patterns - simple, complex, familiar, unfamiliar, static, dramatic,
dense, thin, electronic, recorded - are traced. The Cage is an experience
and, even taken in big doses, an engrossing one. The Stockhausen is an
ordeal - fascinating, disturbing, monumental, melodramatic, powerful, and
exhausting. (18)
8. Cage's artless art
If Cage's innovations in music and art can be seen in connection with a
renunciation of techne, it implies the most radical change in art
since the Greeks, a change that could be characterized as the renunciation
of art in favour of artlessness. Artlessness must however be understood
not simply in the sense of its dictionary meaning as the substantive from
"artless", meaning "without artifice, guileless, unskilful, crude" (OED)
and thus "without cunning or deceit", but as "without art" in the sense
of without preconceiving foreknowledge. Can being without foreknowledge
imply that one is unskilful or crude? Does artless mean being natural?
Can being 'with art' mean that one is cunning and deceitful? With respect
to the former at least, Cage, Feldman and others have indeed been accused
by European composers of being "amateurs", i.e. below the level of fully
fledged, professional composers with the necessary knowledge and expertise.
A man does all these innovations, he is an amateur, I, for years, I'm
still called an amateur. I'm one of the few original people writing music;
I'm an amateur! ... But some jerk, some jerk in Budapest, in a sense, copying
Bartok is a professional! I never understood this... (19)
Presumably there is no great degree of cunning or deceit or craftiness
in this judgement. Boulez and Stockhausen, the main protagonists of the
European tradition against the innovations proposed by Cage and others
from the so-called New York School, were certainly keen on knowing everything
before venturing to compose. They were probably terrified by the prospect
of being accused of being amateurs, an accusation with paralysing effects
in Europe even today, and that not only in the field of music.
Boulez wrote a letter to John Cage in 1951. There was a line in that
letter I will never forget. "I must know everything in order to step off
the carpet." And for what purpose did he want to step off the carpet? Only
to realize the perennial Frenchman's dream ... to crown himself Emperor.
Was it love of knowledge, love of music, that obsesses our distinguished
young provincial in 1951? It was love of analysis - an analysis he will
pursue and use as an instrument of power. (ibid. p.65 )
Feldman seems to have the right intuition about what it means to renounce
knowledge and analysis. Instead of talking about artlessness, he introduces
a distinction between craft and skill which is based on the difference
between revealedness and concealedness, aletheia and lethe.
Craft is something you do in the light; skill is something you do in
the dark. Like making love. If you want to make love in the light, you
have no skill... (ibid. p.173)
The old music is done in the light of reason, on the basis of a theory
of permissible and impermissible sounds. The new music is done "in the
dark", amorously, without foreknowledge. It is a matter of being a good
lover.
9. Substitute Cage for Hölderlin
There is a way of taking a view of Cage's dictums on art as a way of life
from Heidegger's lectures on The Origin of the Work of Art, substituting
now John Cage for Friedrich Hölderlin as the reference artist. If
the substitution works, it will reorient thinking about Heidegger, while
at the same time planting Cage's philosophical insights in deeper soil.
Heidegger posits the work of art as opening an historical world by putting
truth to work/into the work. Truth here is the revealedness of an historical
world. Truth is put to work by being put into the work, which in turn has
the task of opening up an historical world based on another truth, that
is, an historically specific revealedness of being and thus of entities
as such. This opening up is a struggle in which a world is wrested from
the earth. It would seem that Cage as an artist, more specifically, as
a composer, has opened a world with his works and thus set truth to work
and into the work. In this other world a decision is made about what entities
will be. Cage is unequivocal on this point; entities are for him centres
"moving out in all directions without impasse"(20).
This reminds one of Leibniz's monads as force centres, but in contrast
to Leibniz's monads, Cage's centres are not dependent in any way on an
omniscient and omnipotent God for their existence or their properties.
Rather, each centre is a centre in and for itself, and the multitude of
centres interact and interpenetrate without mutually hindering each other.
Because of their an-archic independence, Cage's entities are essentially
contingent and only contingently necessary, i.e. ordered.
Cage's music puts this truth of being to work by treating each aural event,
each tone, sound and noise as its own centre that interpenetrates non-impedingly
other aural centres without becoming subject to any overarching principle,
be it compositional or otherwise. On this basis, existing musical works
from the tradition of Western music can also be cut up and mixed without
doing any violence to them; they are equally valid and do not have priority
over the noises one hears in the streets. Cage's "Mixes" result from this
procedure. There is no longer any principle, any prince or king, holding
sway over the centres and pressing them into one mould or the other. It
is music detached from the willed subject with a certain definite intention.
Each centre happens on its own accord without being predictable on the
basis of an overarching knowledge nor having a function to fulfil in a
whole and thus can happen accidentally and coincidentally and aimlessly.
There does not have to be any overall plan. "The sounds enter the time-space
centered within themselves, unimpeded by service to any abstraction, their
360 degrees of circumference free for an infinite play of interpenetration." (21)In
the course of the fifties, Cage progressed to more and more radical degrees
of indeterminacy in his compositions, so allowing contingency to come into
its own. Getting nowhere means achieving greater degrees of aimlessness
and coincidentality and randomness. The time brackets he employs right
up to his last works ensure that each musician can act, within the brackets,
from his or her own centre. The brackets are given contingently by the
world, e.g. by tosses of the coin.
Cage's music puts truth to work by revealing another openness of beings
as such and thus casting the totality of entities as such in a different
way, namely, anarchically. This is entirely at variance with Heidegger's
conviction that it must be a work of language, more specifically, poetry,
that inaugurates and delineates the casting of another world. This is no
accident but has fundamentally to do with the character of the world Cage's
music inaugurates. This world is silence. The basic event of silence is
noise that has no meaning and comes before language. Can this be compared
with Heidegger's late formulation of the essence of language as "das Geläut
der Stille", "the ringing of silence"? Yes, but only to notice the vast
difference, for Heidegger's formulation is embedded within his thinking
of the foursome of a world in which gods and mortals, earth and heaven
cross over in interplay. "Stillness stills by bearing out world and things
into their essencing." (22)
Cage's ringing of silence, by contrast, is the simple experience of opening
your ears to what's happening. Although Cage wrote very lucid texts about
his music and placed it in a broader philosophical context, it must be
said that his music does not rely on the written thoughts as an underpinning,
but rather the other way round: it is the openness that the music calls
for that demands an adequate language and thinking to describe this historical
event. Cage is first and foremost an artist, a composer, not a thinker.
His texts reflect on what he does as an artist and not, say, on the apophantic
as or the ontological difference, i.e. thoughts won in the course of grappling
with the metaphysical tradition of philosophy. Cage's world of silence
is not rooted in a meaning that is already structured as the foursome of
world. In particular, it is not the world of a people that finds itself
historically in its own poetry-based provincial home, carved out by the
mighty Rhine, but a cosmopolitan world for a planetary population open
to what happens contingently within and without the network that interlinks
them.
Perhaps, after the Second World War, it is only possible to cast a cosmopolitical
world, the world as one place to live for all those living. As Cage puts
it, quoting James Joyce: "Here comes everyone." (23)
More than ever, despite the control exercised by technology and science,
the earth's population is exposed to the openness of possibility rather
than the certainty of a known order. The bonds of an imposed order have
loosened in every respect. It would seem that what was left of the German
spirit fled Nazi Germany in a suitcase, labelled with the incognito 'twelve
tone system', of an Austrian Jew, Arnold Schoenberg. In California, this
suitcase was handed over to an American, John Cage, who transformed its
contents in ways unimaginable for the German émigré. The
German spirit mutated, against Schoenberg's intentions, which were to provide
a continuation of the great German tradition, into something akin to Zen.
The points of similarity between Zen teachings and Heidegger's thinking,
especially after the War, indicate in some way a confluence of East and
West in an incipient planetary thinking.
Cage's seminal piece, 4'33" has been rightly adjudged to be fundamental
to the radical change Cage inaugurated in music. 4'33" = 273", the absolute
zero of stillness.
4'33" (No. 2) (0'00") Solo to be performed in any way by anyone. In
a situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform
a disciplined action. (24)
The world is the openness in which we hear noises willy-nilly when we are
attentive and inquisitive. Attentiveness is the basic characteristic of
human being; it does not mean concentration on one source but rather the
freely floating receptivity for many and varied sources that interpenetrate
unimpededly and refuse to be put into a neat logical order. The piece 4'33"
is openness itself. It is a piece that breaks with the entire Western tradition
of art, i.e. techne, bringing forth into unconcealedness on the
basis of knowledge. Neither the composer nor the performer brings forth;
rather the composer gives or takes no more and no less than a timeframe,
and the performer stages an openness that allows an audience to hear noises
as music. The art work here is the openness itself of the timeframe. The
world is what is taken in at random. This implies something for human being.
Originarily we are given a timeframe that calls us into receptive openness
for the world. Our first act - it is by no means passivity - is listening,
perhaps inquisitively, to what happens in the timeframe granted us. We
hear in the difference of world sounds as sounds, which is what
characterizes us as human beings. We are put out into the difference of
the apophantic as. Only on the basis of listening and being able to hear
sounds as sounds can we respond understandingly. All acts based on will,
i.e. all acts proceeding from a subject, are not originary in the other
world Cage casts. All pursuit of interests, i.e. being among and immersed
in entities, is not originary. We are here for no reason in particular.
In this other world, the subject with its will and interests is derivative.
World is first and foremost given and granted as time-space before a subject,
already having understood entities as such, acts intentionally within it.
World is time-space, like 4'33". This art work sets the truth of world
as time-space to work. It is slight and simple in conception. Precisely
this slightness, brevity and simplicity are the hallmarks of a world-shattering
work that opens up a new world, similar to how Descartes' brief meditations
stand at the portal of the new age of modernity that takes over from the
medieval epoch. Just as Descartes' writings cast the world of the subject
based on the fictive unshakeable certainty of the cogito, Cage's piece
recasts the world as time-space openness, at the same time transforming
the subject into the being-there of Dasein.
Jill Johnston, in 1962 the dance critic of the New York Village Voice,
quotes in her insightful review of Cage's first book, Silence, a
thoughtful remark by the composer Robert Ashley: "...the ultimate result
would be a music that wouldn't necessarily involve anything but the presence
of people. That is, it seems to me that the most radical redefinition of
music that I could think of would be one that defines 'music' without reference
to sound." (25) This is probably
on the right track, although we have still to ask what the presence of
people means and whether it is necessary for music. Does silence need people
to be silence? The tendency is towards an understanding of music and of
art as a whole that opens it up to the originary phenomenon of being there.
Music is the paradigmatic artform for this radical widening because it
comes back to the paradigms of open behaviour in attentiveness and listening.
Silence is the event beyond intention and interest, the event of being
beyond or before relating to any specific entity. Sound is primary here
rather than sight, the supremely metaphysical sense (26),
because listening is the sense of human being's receptivity par excellence.
This listening must not be understood merely as the auditory sense, but
as the openness of existing in the difference of world that lets entities
be themselves. Inquisitiveness is a basic trait of this open human being.
Intentionality in the strict philosophical sense derived from Husserl,
is the subject's act of directing the will towards entities. The will is
at the base of the metaphysical understanding of action that is with us
from the very start of the Western tradition. Aristotle defines action
as striving plus intention (orexis + proairesis). This definition
proceeds from an understanding of human being as being the subject of action
(hypokeinenon tou dramou). Similarly, thinking is also intention
as a directedness of mind towards specific entities. The baseline of metaphysics
is acting on the basis of knowledge or insight. It is not fortuitous that
there is sight in insight, because, as Aristotle notes right at the beginning
of his Metaphysics, sight is the sense that most of all provides
knowledge, i.e. it is the sense of directedness towards entities par
excellence. It is the archetypal prying sense. In contrast to this,
listening is receptivity and not knowledge of entities. It takes things
in as they are without necessarily understanding them or prying into them
or being able to explain them. As a metaphysical and not simply sensual
sense, hearing stands for openness of and to the world, the originary transcendence
that lands human being in a mood out there in the there of the world, without
necessarily being attentive to specific entities. Only on the basis of
this originary openness for being can the being of beings be perceived.
The event of being is the originary unmade missive donative, sent before
any subject can act. As donative it is simultaneously the destiny of being
human.
10. Step back
With his silent piece, 4'33", Cage unknowingly performs the step back about
which Heidegger speaks, but in a way that Heidegger did not envisage, transfixed
as he was on Hölderlin. The step back alters everything, not least
of all the understanding of art. The art work is no longer primarily a
work in the sense of that which has been brought forth. The art work is
no longer thought poietically. Art is not originarily poiesis. This
represents a break with the metaphysical tradition whose implications can
scarcely be overestimated. The step back dissolves the boundary between
art and existence because art becomes artlessness. Both become openness
for the event of being, the originary happening. One immediate corollary
of this is that the artist cannot have an intention he or she wants to
get across, nor can it be a matter of expressing an emotion or of moving
an audience emotively. The art work is then a happening experienced variously
and disparately by an audience. The audience, as the word says etymologically,
is originarily aural, not visual. The viewer is rather the suitable title
for the one experiencing a metaphysical art work. The art work happens
at various independent points and is experienced at various independent
points by the audience. Events overlap and interlace and interact without
impeding each other. There is no unified meaning to be culled from a performance.
In particular, it does not tell a story. It is consistent for Cage, the
first performance or happening artist, to have moved freely beyond the
bounds of music to painting, film, theatre and dance because the postmetaphysical
art work is not primarily what has been brought forth, and thus not definable
in terms of a medium, but is rather the setting up of an open timeframe
for an event or events. This setting up is not a presentation of something
already imagined. Cage even describes the new composer as an entrepreneur:
Composer who no longer arranges sounds in a piece, simply facilitates
an enterprise. Using a telephone, he locates materials, services, raises
money to pay for them. (27)
Not only music is in its element in time, but time is the fundamental dimension
for art and existence sans phrase. The artist dreams up a timeframe;
the audience is framed within its lifetime. The artist acts within the
openness of the event of being and cuts out a frame from it, clearing a
space for something to happen. The artist is no longer an artist but a
clearer, not in the sense of a clarifier but as someone who clears a space
in the originary clearing of the openness of the revealedness of being.
The frame cleared should not be thought of as a duration, which would be
a linear segment of time. Instead, it should be thought of as a three-dimensional
slice cut out of the originary, ecstatic time-space (see below), the art
work being thus an open timeframe excerpted from time-space. Being there
as lifetime is standing out into the three ecstasies of time-space: future,
present and foregoneness. Being here (Dasein) in space has a past, a future
and a present, to all of which Dasein is held out and exposed. What happens
in the timeframe of art as a slice of the originary time-space of existence
is a disparate multiplicity of events that draw attention to this or that
entity, say, this or that sound from this or that instrument. For the listener,
what happens is unforeseeable and unforehearable. Knowing is suspended.
Events burst at random into and within the timeframe cleared as an art
work. The direction of attentiveness is only a response to the more originary
events drawing attention to themselves. Knowing or understanding what is
going on is preceded by being open for what is going on, which presupposes
only an openness for the being of the beings taken in. The being of beings
is understood, which allows things to be taken in as something.
The randomness of what happens happens on the foil of the schema of understanding
the being of entities. This schema is part of the originary donative of
being to being there (Dasein). The gift opens up the as of being
able to perceive beings as beings, so appropriating Dasein for the
sake of being. Within the schema, entities come and go as events, without
cause and without purpose. Nothing precedes the event that would have caused
it; nothing proceeds from the event that would be its purpose. There is
neither efficient cause nor finality.
Cage breaks radically with the European tradition of music and asks why
it is we bother about tradition. Instead of being concerned about "history",
Cage's entire thinking is oriented towards the future, not just in the
sense that it is avant garde rather than conservative and thus furthers
what is new, but in the more fundamental sense that his music is concerned
with opening up the dimension of future in time-space. He was never concerned
with l'art pour l'art, with taste, pleasantness or aesthetics, but
with doing "what must be done". (28)
In the article quoted, which was first published in 1959, he elaborates
on a statement by Christian Wolff in an article published in 1958 characterizing
the new music as "Sound come into its own." Cage comes up with profound
insights into this.
Being concerned with experimental music, he asks "What is the nature of
experimental action?" (ibid. p.69) and replies "It is simply an
action the outcome of which is not foreseen." (ibid.) The word "foreseen"
hits the nail on the head. "Foresight" is sight to the fore, sight ahead,
i.e. sight into the future. Sight into the future means one can see what
is coming. The ecstasy of future in the time-space is transparent to foresight.
"Sound come into its own" means that this transparency becomes opaque.
Instead of sight into the future, attentiveness for what comes unforeseen
out of the space of future is called for. Hearing then has no foresight,
no forehearing, but is called on to be open for what sound comes. Inquisitiveness
gains a pre-eminent status. Cage relates this most radically to indeterminacy
in performing music. The composer works directly with procedures for producing
sounds in a performance, "for nothing one does [as a composer] gives rise
to anything that is preconceived," (ibid.) i.e. there is no pre-existing
work that is performed but instead instructions for producing indeterminately
unforeseen sounds. Another precise and essential word occurs here: "preconception",
the essential characteristic of techne, which is foresight in the
form of foreknowledge. Techne, as Aristotle first thinks it, is
a dynamis, a power or potential. In his metaphysics, Aristotle thinks
the being of dynamis as being a point of departure having dominion
over a change in something else, or in the same thing insofar as it is
something else. (E.g. when the doctor treats herself, she does not treat
herself as a doctor, but as a patient, i.e. as if she were someone else.)
As knowledge, and more specifically, as foreknowledge, techne is
a "point of departure having dominion over a change in something else".
The carpenter who knows his or her art knows in advance how to make a change
in the wooden material so that, say, a bed results. Carpentry as an art
or techne is in the first place foreknowledge or know-how, a potential
as knowing how, not the actual making of the bed itself, which is actualization
of the potential of know-how. The foreknowledge is the preconception on
which the carpenter acts. He or she preconceives the bed that is to be
made. On this basic level, this is no different from the composer preconceiving
the piece to be written "to express sentiments or ideas of order". (ibid.)
Techne
is fundamentally foreknowledge as point of departure for a change in something
else and is thus control over what happens in the future. As insight into
and thus control over the future in this broad sense, techne is
the quintessence of controlling power. In music, the performance of the
work has to measure up to what was preconceived. For new music, being indeterminate,
there is no preconceived yardstick; there is always an element of surprise
at the unexpected, for the composer has left the clearing open to the unforeseen.
When the play of chance is allowed in(to) composition, one renounces foresight
and foreknowledge. Composition ceases to be techne, the control
over change in beings on the basis of knowledge or preconception, and comes
to be an experiment for what could happen in an open time-space. Experience
comes into its own in experimental music. What is primary here is the time-space
and its openness to possible experiences. The future of this time-space
is no longer transparent but opaque. In its opaqueness it is open nevertheless,
keeping possibility open. Openness here means first of all the cleared
opening of time-space and second, receptivity on the part of listeners
for what sounds arrive from the future into the present. Openness does
not mean being able to see or intuit what comes. The elements involved
in the performance of this new music are mostly uncontrolled, the composer
only laying down certain parameters to stake out the time-space-frame.
And this is what is needed historically:
For it is the space and emptiness that is finally urgently necessary
at this point in history (not the sounds that happen in it - or their relationships)
(not the stones - thinking of a Japanese stone garden - or their relationships
but the emptiness of the sand which needs the stones anywhere in the space
in order to be empty). (ibid. p.70)
Primary is the emptiness of the future from which the sounds come. Music
then becomes - unleashed from taste and preconceptions and expectations
- surprising. With the step back, it is opened up to possibility and thus
loosens up. Historically necessary is the openness for the clearing of
time-space into which sounds burst like bubbles. Music first has to be
cleared of preconceived, pre-ordered sounds, the slate wiped clean to clear
the time-space for openness and receptivity. "Then things - sounds, that
is - would come into being of themselves." (ibid.) This is a matter
of urgent necessity, whereas "much of modern music is no longer urgently
necessary" (ibid.). And Cage asks:
Why is this so necessary that sounds should be just sounds? There are
many ways of saying why. One is this: In order that each sound may become
the Buddha." (ibid.)
Sounds, standing for things or entities in general, can become the "Buddha"
if the openness of stillness is allowed to prevail. Stillness is the time-space
in which things, including sounds, happen. Happening comes towards us out
of the future. Cage proceeds from the insight that music happens in time,
and that time is the most fundamental element of music. But everything
happens in time-space; sounds are only exemplary for entities in general.
"We are in time itself..." (ibid.) We exist in the still clearing
and cleared stillness of time-space itself, so long as we exist. We exist
towards the future, as long as we exist. Things come toward us out of the
clearing of the future, mostly unforeseen. Only as long as we exist is
this time-space with its three ecstasies open to us. Another way of saying
this is to observe that we exist in the clearing of being as mortals. As
mortals existing in the openness of time-space, everything that happens
in this time-space "may become the Buddha". Being there as mortals precedes,
is more originary than having insight and foresight, since the future is
essentially opaque, although open. This opacity is not a lack but is the
fullness of elusive possibility, which can be experienced as such.
Techne,
including modern technology, presupposes the clearing of time-space in
which mortals can also perhaps have foresight and know-how and be technicians
in the widest sense. The foresight and control provided by technology are
secondary to the richness of possibility.
It is not immediately clear how or whether this translates onto the level
of politics and social change, especially since politics is a matter of
managing our affairs, i.e. of dealing with entities on the basis of interests.
It cannot be a matter of political struggle, which would presuppose a willed,
striving subject who gets involved in the struggle of interests. It is
more than questionable whether Cage's political anarchism fits his more
fundamental anarchism of surrendering the arche of techne,
arche
being understood as being a starting point having dominion over a change,
archemetaboles.
Any political stance, in any case, has to be viewed as something deriviative
in the light of the more radical departure from the
arche of techne
and thus any of the conventional forms of political anarchism are not adequate
to this more fundamental casting of human being, based as they are on ideas
about being free from the state, i.e. they are essentially negative
movements against the state as a universal social subject with the
role of governing society and keeping it together within certain forms
of right. The individual with inalienable human rights underlies these
'anti' conceptions of politics. An-archism is interpreted as anti the state
and is thus dependent on the state. Anarchism in the sense of letting sounds
be sounds and things be what they are, by contrast, is not directed against
an arche but is a renunciation of arche in the sense
of the controlling foresight of techne. As renunciation and a relinquishment
of control, it is a step back. It is thus presumably a renunciation of
politics, leaving the latter to its own fate. The an in an-arche
is not a negation but a step back. The an-arche is also a-techne,
i.e. a-technicism in a fundamental but easily misunderstandable sense,
because no opposition to technology or negation of it is implied but rather
a step back from technology. The step back does not have to land us back
in the simplicity of peasant life. As renunciation of the primacy of technological
knowledge, the step back does not imply having to do without electricity
or PCs but opens up the horizon within which we define ourselves as human
beings. It widens the view from entities as such to the openness of being
as such.
11. There is silence and silence
We have to ask whether Cage and Heidegger are talking about the same thing
when they talk about silence. Probably they are not, coming at it as they
do from completely different directions, the one as thinker, the other
as composer. Presumably they are, to judge from some surprising similarities
in their texts. Heidegger, steeped in the Western metaphysical tradition,
comes to silence from there, perhaps via Meister Eckhart most of all. Cage,
immersed in Indian and Zen thinking, comes to silence from there, but perhaps
also via Meister Eckhart and above all by thinking about music. Where Cage
discovers duration to be the most fundamental element of music, he is imagining
linear time in a metaphysical manner, but where he talks about each sound
being the Buddha in the openness of silence, he is, unknowingly, closer
to Heidegger's thinking. Nowhere, however, does Cage talk about ecstatic
time as the three-dimensional time-space, nor does he grapple with the
Western tradition's texts on time, starting with Aristotle.
Ecstatic time as rethought by Heidegger needs to be brought closer to what
Cage has done with and to music, proceeding from what Heidegger has done
with and to metaphysical thinking.
In one of his late lectures from 1964 entitled 'The End of Philosophy and
the Task of Thinking', Heidegger interprets once again Parmenides' fragments
and comes to the "tranquil heart of the clearing" as the "place of stillness"
(29).
We take this text to flesh out the references above to time-space because
allusions to the foursome of world, after having been prevalent in the
fifties (30), are again absent.
Only from this place of stillness, says Heidegger, can "presence presence".
(ibid.)
The clearing grants, before everything else, the possibility of the
path to presence and grants the possible presencing of the latter itself.
(op. cit. p.75)
It is a matter of stillness being the clearing in which presencing can
happen, thus opening up the possibility of a "belonging together of being
and thinking, i.e. presence and taking-in". (ibid.) Presence in
the broad sense talked about here includes absence, and there are two basic
modes of absence that constitute the other two dimensions of time. Time,
as Heidegger says in another talk given late in life, is the "provisional
name for what is later called 'the truth of being'" (31),
i.e. the clearing or aletheia. Silence is the stillness of time,
which is given by the event. The three ecstasies of time, the present,
the future and foregoneness are all ways of presencing, albeit that the
latter two are modes of absence. Heidegger characterizes these modes of
absence respectively as refusal and withholding. The three dimensions of
time are brought together and held apart by the play of nearing, which
is called the fourth dimension of time. Nearness
holds the forgone open by refusing its arrival as the present. This
nearing of nearness holds arrival from the future open by, in its coming,
withholding the present. Nearing nearness has the character of refusal
and withholding. It holds in advance the modes of passing foregoneness,
arrival and present to each other in their unity. (32)
There is nothing in Cage's writings corresponding to this thinking-through
of refusal and withholding, but there is perhaps something in Cage's music
that comes close to them or is even essentially the same thing. Refusal
is another, positive way of saying 'no longer', and withholding is another,
positive way of saying 'not yet'. Cage's music happens in the time-space
of time and must be thought three-dimensionally, taking into account this
temporal refusal and temporal withholding.
Nearness passes over the play of time by passing one ecstasy of time to
the other in a way that also keeps them apart. With respect to music, this
passing concerns not the way sounds come and go but the clearing of time
in which the sounds come and go. For Cage, this clearing is the silence
he speaks about as primary, or "the space and emptiness that is finally
urgently necessary", the space and emptiness in which "each sound may become
the Buddha", but more importantly, the space and emptiness that can be
experienced as such because of the sounds that come and go. Can this be
heard in Cage's music? I think it can, precisely because his music is not
a continuity of interrelated sounds but the bursting of sounds in the present.
The sounds are not primary, they are not in the foreground, but they allow
the openness of the time-space in which they sound to be experienced in
its inaccessible and unmanipulable withdrawal. By not being interrelated
in anything like a melody line constituting the continuity of the piece,
each sound is a surprise, existing in and for itself and erupting into
presence unannounced. Each sound does not contribute to a continuity or
the development of an aural whole. The sound that has resounded is gone
into the dimension of foregoneness and can only be recalled in the memory
of the listener. Its presence is now refused in the present, leaving it
open to other sounds arriving from the future. The foregone sound has not
formed a basis for a continual development of sounds but is embedded in
silence. Thus the refusal of the present can be experienced in not being
heard. The sound sounds and is gone. It has no job to do in a larger continuity;
it is sufficient in itself. It comes and goes into foregoneness without
leaving a legacy, without building up anything to come that should proceed
'logically' from it. It does not draw another sound after itself but breaks
off its ties with the present, leaving it open for anything to come. Although
remembered by its auditors, the foregone sound leaves no preconceived aftereffects.
This leaving-open is experienced in not being heard. The sound arriving
from the future is not announced by a preceding development, it is not
drawn out of the future by a continuity or a progression having gone before,
but is held back in coming in the future before it arrives in the present.
Not the sound that has not yet arrived is primarily to be experienced here
but the holding back, the withholding itself of the future which nearness
keeps separated from the present in holding it back. Out of the withholding
of the future, the coming sound enters the present, unforeseen and unforeheard,
to sound in and for itself. Not being part of a continuity, it is surrounded
by the openness of silence. Thus the withholding of the future is experienced
in not being heard.
Cagean music is originarily silence as the three-dimensional clearing of
time-space, and only secondarily defineable as something that can be heard.
What Cage composes is not music as a putting together of sounds. His music
is not primarily sound, and has nothing to do with Cage, because it is
pregiven. Cage steps back before the clearing of time-space. His music
makes the step back able to be experienced. It is doubtful whether Cage
can be thought of as a composer in anything like the traditional sense.
Perhaps he is indeed an amateur, a lover and absconds as a composer.
Although Cage does not think his silence like Heidegger thinks his, there
is every indication that Cage's music and Heidegger's thinking are based
on one and the same experience of the clearing of time-space and the presencing
within it. This silence cannot be determined at all with reference to sound
(entities); it is thus also not the unintentional sound as which Cage sometimes
defines it, but is the nothingness and rich emptiness of the clearing itself,
the event of the opening up of time of which human being partakes and into
which it is thrown. Cage's art and Heidegger's thinking, without having
communicated with each other, belong to the same historical event of the
end of metaphysics and the step back.
In a first approximation, Cage's art can be described negatively as a departure
from techne, the renunciation of technique as foreknowledge and
foreknowledge as technique. But where does this step back lead? It leads
to nothing, namely, to the nothingness of the clearing of time-space, the
event of presencing in the clearing. In this way, Cage's artless art can
be thought positively. It is simplicity itself, which is the hardest of
all to experience and grasp. Thus Cage can say that art is like "getting
bitten by a monkey". Why? Because experiencing art and getting bitten by
a monkey can both only happen in the primordial clearing of time-space.
There is nothing essential to distinguish art from life once one takes
leave of art as techne. Cage is the artist absconditus and thus
an important historical figure prefiguring a possible step back from a
directedness towards entities. Only the open clearing of time-space is
originary; no entity can take on the role of the event of being, even if
one calls this entity God. The sounds may become Buddha, but only within
the originary emptiness.
The event of time-space reaches us as humans and makes us into human beings
by calling us into the clearing. We do not only take in what happens, the
events that occur, the entities that impinge on us, but more originarily,
the play of presencing itself. This is what Heidegger calls the event or
the happening. The happening happens, and that's all there is to it. On
this basis, art can only become artless, amateurish and the artist a lover,
doing things "in the dark".
12. Cage's technological credulity
After having said all this about Cage's daring and breathtaking departure
from Western techne, it comes as a surprise and disappointment to
find him, later in life, naively believing in technological progress as
a cure-all for the ills of humankind. But his adherence to the viewpoints
of the American technological Utopian, Buckminster Fuller, amounts to nothing
less. An irrepressible optimism bordering on simple-mindedness becomes
noticeable. By means of the enormous increases in productivity made possible
by technology, the problem of the distribution of the world's resources
is to be solved. There is a big shift in Cage's concerns from the mid-sixties
on, which goes so far as the following tit-bit, published in the third
part of his Diary in 1967:
She asked me whether it was true that art no longer interests me. I
said I thought we'd done it, opened our eyes, our ears. What's urgent is
society, not fixing it, but changing it, so it works.
The sub-title to the diary, "You will only make Matters worse", contains
some self-irony, but Cage is nevertheless seriously intent on improving
the world. He maintains that inequality of distribution is the cause of
wars so that, after its removal, "there will then be no rational reason
for war" (33)(as if war
were based on a rationality of distribution). There is a chasm between
Cage's startlingly naive views on technology and his understanding of Eastern
ways of thinking that had such profound effects on his work as a creative
artist. Here, one has to think about Heidegger's remark:
It is my conviction that a turn-around can only be prepared at the
same world-location at which the modern technical world arose and that
this cannot happen by adopting Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences
of the world. (34)
Cage, as far as I can ascertain, did not read Western philosophy. He did
not immerse himself in and wrestle with its texts. Apart from books from
Eastern authors such as Suzuki, Sri Ramakrishna and Huang-Po, Cage was
influenced by American thinkers such as Marshall McLuhan and Fuller. The
only traditional European author he cites as having influenced him is Meister
Eckhart. Reflection on the metaphysical foundations of his own thinking
is thus noticeably absent and unworked-out. This deficit, it seems to me,
allows him to fall for technicist solutions. He has a benevolent understanding
of human being, thinking, following Fuller, that it is largely a practical
matter of "making life on earth an unequivocal success". (35)
Without being aware of it, Cage asks the historical question of who we
are with his art on a very deep level, but on the level of his political
understanding, he imagines human being as something innocuous, as if hate,
envy, greed, spite, etc. were peripheral to it. For him the problem of
war could be solved by rational means, by redistributing wealth and abolishing
private ownership, whereas his art, by relinguishing techne, has
taken leave of this very same rationality. If, however, Cage's art dovetails
with the historical question of who we are in the West, then rationality
and technology cannot be left untouched. Both become questionable. In particular,
- and this results in Cage's fatal lapse into do-goodery - technology cannot
be regarded as a means to be put to good ends or bad, as Fuller and Cage
would have it, but must be seen as part of our being that has taken us
over: we exist today in the clearing cleared by a (Cartesian) metaphysical
casting of time-space that has made mathematical scientific knowledge possible.
If this clearing now becomes inhabited by elements we cannot grasp with
knowledge, i.e. if entities become essentially contingent, we change. Our
being is then infected by what we cannot control and we need to respond
with another ethos that can let be. Rationality, which has always been
associated with the light that reason brings into the darkness of ignorance,
loses its throne at the apex of human being. It is not what we know, and
what we can do with that knowledge, that defines us essentially as human
beings, but what we do not know. What we do not and can not know is, in
the first place, the event of being that, itself withdrawn, grants us the
time-space in which we exist. In the second place, however, we do not and
can not know the contingent. And this is not a lack or defect of human
being.
Cage's technological credulity is an offspring of American pragmatism,
a way of thinking that he was apparently imbued with by his father, the
inventor. In this attitude there is something of the conviction of being
able to do anything if you just put your mind to it. As a late variant
of metaphysics, pragmatism is embedded in metaphysical presuppositions
it cannot think through from within itself. The step back that Cage performs
with his art, however, makes the knowing of technology visible as being
a possibility only granted by the clearing of being. The doability resulting
from technological know-how cannot be an originary ethos because it depends
on the more originary openness of being in which entities can appear as
entities. On the basement floor level of the clearing of being, there is
no know-how but instead the mooded acceptance of being, which precedes
even the acceptance of beings. Being can only be accepted because it grants
itself to human being-there. The clearing of time-space first provides
the opening for entities to come and go. At first it is not important how
and why they come and go, but simply that they come and go as they
are, that is, as entities. This givenness of entities as they are by the
event of being means that what is there accidentally, at random, by chance,
at haphazard is on an equal footing with what can be explained, theorized,
controlled, which, in fact, constitutes only a small part of what happens
in the clearing of the truth of being.
In emulating Fuller, Cage treats technology as a means for solving humanity's
problems. What stands in the way is allegedly private property, divisive
intelligence, dog eat dog politics and the like. Cage demands a global
way of thinking and problem-solving rather than a particularistic one.
In view of the global village, his message is: come together. He regards
wars, etc. as "part of dying political and economic structures" (36),
as if capitalism were coming of its own accord to an end to give way to
anarchistic cooperation. Economics and politics are singled out as what
has to be done away with.
The problem of work is solved. Machines take the place of muscles.
We've not yet the right to object to war. First we must disarm, then implement
means for making the world's resources the possession of all men. (ibid.
Pt.2)
These are exhortative remarks. Is social change to be had through exhortation,
i.e. agitat |
