[In religious rituals and in the proclamation of the Word in preaching], "being present" means genuine participation in the redemptive event itself. No one can doubt that aesthetic differentiation--attending to how "beautiful" the ceremony was or how "well preached" the sermon--is out of place, given the kind of claim that is made on us. Now, I maintain that the same thing is basically true when we experience art. Here too the mediation must be thought of as total. Neither the being that the creating artist is for himself--call it his biography--nor that of whoever is performing the work, nor that of the spectator watching the play, has any legitimacy of its own in the face of the being of the artwork itself.
As a lover of poetry and in particular of poetic drama, I am in complete accord with this saying of Gadamer in Truth and Method. But as a religious being searching for piety, I cannot understand how the anxiety does not arise for Gadamer which his religion-art parallel induces in me. How are we to decide whether the claim a work of art makes on us is one which it is pious to obey? If it is impious to ask such a question, how are we to become initiated into the correlative piety? Or if it is a matter of returning to an original piety from the impiety of questioning the claim a work of art made on us, how are we ever to extricate ourselves from idolatrous claims? What if the play which presents itself in a work of art and in doing so making a claim on the whole of life (as Gadamer also says) is a wicked god, like the gods Augustine discerned behind the "scenic plays" of ancient Rome?
An excellent post! I would like to concentrate my response on the following line of questioning you so conscientiously pursue, alive as you apparently are to the severity of its consequences. Let me not do any more than further stir the pot, in keeping with the style of ktl. You ask:
ReplyDelete"How are we to decide whether the claim a work of art makes on us is one which it is pious to obey? If it is impious to ask such a question, how are we to become initiated into the correlative of piety? Or if it is a matter of returning to an original piety from the impiety of our questioning the claim a work of art has made on us, how are we ever to extricate ourselves from idolatrous claims?"
It is this train of inquiry that recalls that famous, oracular pronouncement which concluded a consideration of the historically-founding power of art --a consideration which itself served to conclude the first genuinely sustained inquiry into just what we are to think the essence of technology is. This pronouncement runs: Questioning is the piety of thought. Such a pronouncement seals Heidegger's consideration of what has been called art in ancient Greece, and no doubt refers most of all to the third of your cryptic triptych of questions. For here, Heidegger is referring to the calm heroism not of asking a question or a collection of questions, but of raising and upholding a line of questionING, of following through on such questioning in such a way that an entire passage of questioning surprisingly unfolds as the very way one is to question, a way which the questioner MUST go. This questioning attains its essence by undermining itself, i.e. by eventually putting into question the presupposition of the intial question it in the first place raises. Thus it moves according to a NECESSITY as opposed to whim; what such questioning presupposes beforehand is what it asks after. In the case of piety, you yourself seem to recognize this necessity of questioning inherent in the very precondition of locating the 'correlate of piety'whe you ask, "if it is impious to ask such a question, [then] how are we [ever] to become initiated into the correlative of piety?" Here --in this very question that you raise-- the necessity of such questioning is confirmed even as it is questioned.
But the question is begged from this confirmation is "Why?". Put another way, if it is true that the piety of the ancient Greek experience of the overwhelming yet uncertain presence of divinity ensured in advance that one would never, at least so long as that presence remained, raise so much as a single interrogative syllable towards such divinity, then on the strength of the very same principle it is true that we, lateborn as we are, MUST question. For ancient man did not win the piety which characterizes his essence by way of a preliminary series of deliberations or interrogative exercises: the divine ALREADY came to presence before his eyes. Indeed, even before he opened his eyes the appearance of the divinities rested on the tip of his tongue, in the telling word of myth. But the manner in which what is divine is given is also the manner in which it is missed; such is the peculiar essence of what can properly be called divine. Therefore, according to the very same divine essence whereby ancient man could not help but begin in a certain unsolicited and undiscovered piety, so too must the attempts of today, i.e. in the age whose essence lies in technology, begin in an unsolicited and undiscovered impiety. To sustain a line of questioning which not only arises from but goes after its starting point, i.e, the starting point inherited by an age throughly ruled by the essence of technology, is to bring the origin of impiety into question even such a questioning springs from this origin. Impiety thus for the first time faces itself. What does such impiety look like and why has it taken so long to even be glimpsed? Is it possible that this very impiety hid in the piety of the ancients? Is it possible that the ancient piety hides in the impiety of man's existence today? ? Here, I think, can be discerned the beginning of an answer to Gadamer's problematic, as well as where his formulation of it falls short. For not only is the 'mediation' of thinking as it concerns the truth art a questionable mediation. It is also the case that the unmediation of the initially unquestionable nature of art is something preeminently worthy of thought, i.e. is fragewurdig
ReplyDeleteWhat can I possibly say in reply? Or I suppose I should ask what must I say? I am interested in the nature of the necessity you attribute to the line of thinking on which I am irrecoverably embarked. Why must I question these gods? Why can I not simply ignore them?
ReplyDeleteOr is this what you meant to ask in introducing the second section of your reply? But what provokes the question why? Is this question itself a further working out of the necessity?
You say that "the manner in which what is divine is given is also the manner in which it is missed," and I think this is your answer to the question as to why it is necessary to question the gods, even in this age in which it seems that they are already thoroughly abolished. And I do believe that the greatest inspirations of the "lateborn" are always in an elegiac mood. But after your whole line of questioning, my question remains the same: should these inspirations for all their greatness not perhaps be refused or at least deferred until their source should show itself worthy of obedience?
I like the way you wrapped up my response. It is true that the heart of it lies in the question of how the divinity is to be thought, of how it is given and yet missed. I insist that this question 'about' the divinity arises not on the basis of curiosity but because of the reticence of the divinity itself, i.e. because of the still unthought essence of what is divine. Several highly important distinctions must be observed here. First, it must be admitted that we do not ever decide to be involved in that dimension in which the divine brilliantly flashes. The failure to recognize this pre-commitment to such a realm is what in part characterizes the essential presumption of modern impiety. Impiety, understood in terms of this characterization, is not --at least in the first place --a personal decision, since it could only be something fit for the scales of phronetic deliberation if it if it has beforehand lost all of its gravitas as a compelling, commanding hierophany, i.e. as something quite other than a either a fact or contrivance. "Far-darting Apollo descended upon the Achaian camp as the night." This is neither contestable not incontestable. It occurs in a realm whose stillness and purity lies before any possibility of contention. From out of the overwhelming brilliance of such a realm, men find themselves pouring libations and sacrificing in holocausts in accord with a need which they have not understood but has yet been given for them to attempt to fulfill. Such is the tragic essence of the Greeks, which means of course the Greek essence of tragedy, the scape-goat's song of sacrifice.
ReplyDeleteSecond, on the basis of this pre-commitment, a clearer idea of modern impiety comes to light: it is not the result of a deliberation. Thinking that the gods lie in the hands of men, to be believed or not believed, is a thought which does not precede but is rather precisely made possible by this impiety. The decision regarding the flight or arrival of gods is an historical decision. It is not a decision about one's preferred'world-view', but about whether one will recall his prior state of pre-commitment.
Thirdly and most relevant to your concern however, is the folling: in which domain is the proper response/responsibility to the mysterious hierophany of historical divinity bounded? The answer can be pointed to by reflecting on a few superficial observations: 1. In the throes of ancient piety, an ethical dimension was inextricable from hierophany. In other words, the divinities were not a landscape which some diviners had the luxury to gaze upon. They were rather the homeland itself. They informed the ethos in the sense of demanding prayer, sacrifice, and even housing (whether in the word of myth or in the temple walls). In this way the pre-commitment of ancient piety necessarily entailed an ethical obedience which was itself entirely pre-reflective and unamenable to later conceptual elucidation. It was obeyed without being decided on or 'cognitively' known. It is important to recognize that on account of this ethical intimacy, even a man who was 'impious' was not a man who denied the pre-givenness of the gods, but a man who wished to supercede or resist their interventions or aims.
ReplyDelete2.)Modern impiety shares precisely the same node of pre-givenness as ancient piety. One is from the outset ethically un-committed. He must decide what and who he will believe ---or so he has been given to believe. Thus the realm of divinity to which historical humanity had been committed does not, Modernity, get erased or even put up for decision, it simply becomes so obscure as to be a vaccuum of unacknowledged pre-commitment.
3.) The questioning that arises in the age of technology does not find the divinity pregiven in an inevitable hierophany nor does it find it as an object of man's consent or deliberation. Instead it finds its very pre-givenness as something not yet understood and therefore questionable. When one questions in this fashion, has he committed hastily to an unknown master? Or has he undertaken for the first time to prepare for the arrival of what ancient man only experienced the fading after-glow of? Can one defer and wait for what he has pre-committed to since time immemorial?
I don't see the distinction you make in the first two of your three concluding questions. Isn't preparing for an arrival a way of being mastered?
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry I cant respond more fully to the many interesting remarks you've made here
The distinction in the first two of my three concluding questions that I am trying to bring one small step further into clarity is the following: The ethically intimate domination of ancient existence in which the chiaroscuric riddles, the pious devotion, and the merely temporary appeasement afforded by urgent sacrifice were inseparably bound to divine appearance in the mythical word, this ethically intimate domination is based upon an inherited, fateful precommitment. This precommitment does not get absolved by the doubt or certainty or self-assertion that becomes possible in modernity(as if it should or even could be simply be undone, like shackle and chains); the pre-commitment whose tug was felt by ancient existence as an irrevocable even if irresponsible bind simply "grows perfectly shy"; the gods flee not away from man but into that secret realm of intimate domination which, for example, modern man comes to identify with his unconscious. But this ethical mastery which has a priori descended upon ancient existence and which remains in a manner that is dangerously forgotten by modernity is in a unique and hitherto impossible way brought into relation with man's existence in that questioning which becomes possible on the basis of the inheritance that constitutes the possibilities of the age of technology. In other words, for the first time this precommitment itself calls for further questioning in a manner that surpasses all doubt, i.e. all questioning that remains on the mere level of suspicion. This questioning surpasses doubt because it is presupposed and thus earlier than all doubt. In such a questioning the relation of man's existence to such aforementioned ethical intimacy is altered. In this change I locate the POSSIBLE difference between the preparatory nature of the thinking that is to come and the mastery of a divinity which once receded and then was forgotten altogether. Is this mere possibility adequate to the problem of existential impiety or does it show the necessity of its inadequacy in a hitherto unnoticed way?
ReplyDeleteI don't know what you're talking about. How do you locate a possible difference in a change?
ReplyDeletePerhaps this is something that awaits not my clarification but yours. Of course I could continue to expand with the aim of elucidation, but your question seems only to ask about my final statement in isolation from everything that led up to it and sought to render it intelligible. On the other hand, this culmination of my response that you now ask about barely says anything that is not in need of further clarification. However, I think that my responses have suffered not from saying too little but too much. So let me venture less.
ReplyDeleteThe reference to "possible difference" means first of all, a difference that is not actual. This should be understood in contradistinction to a difference that is actual, e.g. the difference between ancient piety and modern impiety. Previously I asserted of this difference that the impiety of modern man depends upon the hidden piety of ancient man or rather, I may as well have asserted it when I asked:
"Is it possible that this very impiety hid in the piety of the ancients? Is it possible that the ancient piety hides in the impiety of man's existence today?"
This assertion has more than one meaning. The question I lay before you is: in what does the actuality of this actual difference consist? What is the real heart of this difference?
Before I venture an answer to the question you left me with here last week, let me venture this: I am not interested in surpassing or overcoming suspicion on this point. I am flat out suspicious of the origin of the work of art (or the self-presentation of play, or whatever it may be called). It creeps me out, I find its demands demonic, and the occult fascination which once sufficed to win my devotion now only sends a light shudder of horror down my back.
ReplyDeleteWhat you call piety and impiety, and the piety of impiety and the impiety of piety, I can only with great trepidation, hesitation, and sickened remorse regard as anything but misery on all sides.
That is an honest response --although I am inclined to say that I share your mind on the matters you have confided. The "occult fascination" of which you make mention most immediately reminds me of Yeats. But I think one must exercise patience of an extraordinary measure when they are descrying what appears WITHIN HISTORY. This last qualification, namely that of the historical provision of the phenomena at hand, is the key, and the main reason why thinking of this sort must be ventured ---yet never ventured as if it were undangerous, as if it were a safely established doctrine or creed. Other and higher forms of revelation do indeed warrant this more complete commitment, but the paradox of the sort of thinking that has above been claimed to originate from the essence of technology is this: that one's commitment does not stand in inverse proportionality to one's questioning of it. Your suspicion is therefore not only warranted --it may even be not suspicious enough, if by this we mean that it has as of yet failed to clarify for itself the presuppositions in terms of which it has become suspicious.
ReplyDeleteAs for your "sickness unto death" over my talk of piety and impiety and the strange historical guises that the concatenation of the two take on, C.S Lewis has written something which, ever since it was quoted by the always insightful Glenn Arbery, has stuck in my mind: "An inch beneath the surface of Homer there lies despair." Initially I was adverse to this tendency, but I have since considered it to be great wisdom. It does not mean to condemn the quiet wonder of Homeric song to some sort of Modern nihilism. One need only understand how this despair is indeed concealed while being marvelously acknowledged in a non/pre-conceptual manner by the entire Homeric world. Even in this tension, I believe one may catch sight of how modern impiety hides in ancient piety, provide one does not hear the latter statement as an anachronistic "mapping", but understands it in terms of the concealment of time (i.e. epoche).
Also, with regard to art, it seems to me not less but more questioning is required, since I do not think that Gadamer's position above is entirely resonant with Die Ursprung des Kuntswerkes. It has taken me years to gain a foothold in terms of which to properly understand the latter, but on my current reading, I do not find it to be anything occultish...in fact I find it to be an inveitability of the 'method' of phenomenology set forth in SZ when the latter is properly pursued. Regarding your own position on the matter of art, I think it is worth pointing out that you initially introduced a sort of duplicity that you were hoping to reconcile:
ReplyDelete"As a lover of poetry and in particular of poetic drama, I am in complete accord with this saying of Gadamer in Truth and Method. But as a religious being searching for piety, I cannot understand how the anxiety does not arise for Gadamer which his religion-art parallel induces in me."
Does this differ from you recent claims, namely:
"I am flat out suspicious of the origin of the work of art (or the self-presentation of play, or whatever it may be called). It creeps me out, I find its demands demonic"
I think one way of characterizing the present discussion could be: an attempt to draw the distinction --with the medium of art as a background --between what is daimonic (as an historical hierophany) and what is demonic (insofar as it belongs to the real spiritual opposition to the ultimate revelation of the Divine, i.e. that revelation which does not deceive or hold back but gives in full).
I think what you have made clear here is that my recognition of this duplicity in myself (concealed though it was in my bracketing quas) served me as a preface to the exorcism of the same duplicity. In other words, I have renounced my love of poetry.
ReplyDelete