Did Martin Heidegger ever endeavor to write a philosophy of art? While it is undeniable that his thoughts significantly turned to art in the early 1930s and for decades thereafter, it is generally agreed that his contributions to the matter were never meant to be part of the philosophical project of contemporary ‘aesthetics’ that began in the early eighteenth century. As Iain Thomson puts it, it rather looks as though Heidegger wanted to work through aesthetics in an effort to move beyond it so that he might thus reveal the manner in which it had ‘occluded [art's] true historical significance’ (cf. Thomson Reference Thomson2015). But should Heidegger's criticism of philosophical aesthetics be read as a repudiation of all philosophies of art or as the starting point of a new proposition in that field?
Not unlike Thomson, Ingvild Torsen writes that ‘Heidegger considers art and the history of aesthetics as major resources both for thinking about truth and historical change and for challenging technology’ (Torsen Reference Torsen and Kelly2014; my emphasis). Moved by similar considerations, Seubold argues that Heidegger's interest in art was therefore only meant to further his philosophy of Being, and that he thus never intended to give that interest the ‘character of a philosophy of art’ (Seubold Reference Seubold1996: 98).Footnote 1 Reaching similar conclusions, albeit in a more forceful tone, Otto Pöggeler (Reference Pöggeler, Harries and Jamme1994 a and Reference Pöggelerb) is well known to have denied that Heidegger ever articulated a philosophy of art tout court.
Meanwhile, some insist that Heidegger did in fact produce a true philosophy of art. In his introduction to his Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst, for example, von Hermann explicitly criticizes Pöggeler's views in a manner that recalls Julian Young's reply to Seubold in the concluding words to his Heidegger's Philosophy of Art. There Young writes that Seubold's arguments (and implicitly Pöggeler's as well) accept ‘without question, the requirement that the philosopher of art should be “objective”, should not approach art from the perspective of his own thought structure and vocabulary’ (Young Reference Young2001: 173). For Young and von Herrmann, to deny that Heidegger wrote a philosophy of art is to presuppose, falsely, that a philosophy of art must necessarily be deployed from a ‘view from nowhere’, which is to say, from a viewpoint that Heideggerians know since at least Being and Time to be phenomenologically misguided. Heidegger's is therefore a ‘philosophy of art’ proper, albeit one that rightly rejects the demand for scientific objectivity that is tied to the project of philosophical aesthetics as it has historically understood itself.
Much of the debate, then, revolves around how one defines the project of a philosophy of art. If philosophical aesthetics constitute the essence of that project, then Heidegger cannot have written a philosophy of art. But if we understand the latter differently and distinctly from aesthetics, then it just might be that he has in fact offered us just that. On the face of it, then, it looks as though coming to a decision on this issue would require that we objectively establish what a philosophy of art ought to be and what methodology is better suited to its purpose. Such a daunting task, however, escapes the more modest scope of this paper, and thus our opening question is unlikely to receive an answer at this time.
For in what follows my goal is to argue that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying [Dichtung] can help contemporary institutional theorists of art think the condition of ‘artistic creativity’ that bears on performances generative of artworks.Footnote 2 Evidently, this means that I intend to draw from Heidegger's philosophical considerations about art and artworks and to apply one of its central concepts to a problem in the field of institutional theories of art broadly understood, a field many would include in the realm of contemporary aesthetics.
And that is why, unanswered though it may be, the problem raised by this paper's opening question nonetheless frames the paper's arguments with perilous ravines on both sides. Obviously, those who think that Heidegger never meant to write a philosophy of art will think the project ill-fated from the start. In contrast, those who interpret Heidegger's musings on art as a ‘philosophy of art’ proper are likely to think that the proposed argument so importantly betrays its Heideggerian origins as to render the appeal to poetic saying baseless. For regardless of one's views in this debate, it must be seen that both sides agree on the fact that Heidegger's turn to art ultimately remains incompatible with the project of contemporary aesthetics insofar as the latter is understood to treat art and artworks as vorhanden, ready-to-hand, that is, as objectively available to the philosopher's gaze and to mere descriptions.
Heidegger's own theoretical point of departure in addressing the question of art makes that perfectly clear. Indeed, in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, Heidegger explicitly states that he only means to discuss ‘great art’: ‘von [grosser Kunst] allein ist hier die Rede’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 26). Hence, if contemporary aesthetics and institutional theories are indeed characterized by the project of providing a merely descriptive account of artworks—and I assume that they are—Heidegger's discriminating interest in only great artworks clearly disqualifies him from the start. Nevertheless, my gambit in this paper is that though the two philosophical approaches ultimately prove incompatible, this does not necessarily entail that they have nothing to offer one another. After all, have aesthetics not provided Heidegger with a discursive space to move through and beyond toward truth and Being? If aesthetics could be a resource for Heidegger, it just might be, then, that his contributions could in turn offer contemporary philosophers of art the means to think their own objects better.
Thus, I argue that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying [Dichtung] can be interpreted in such a way as to help the institutional theorist of art describe more accurately the creativity that pertains to intentional accomplishments generative of novel artworks. Such a description is wanting, I will show in the first section, because contemporary institutional theories of art generally fail to account for the manner in which new artworks creatively disturb the normative setting of their artworld. To demonstrate this, I will turn to David Davies's description of the performances generative of artworks in his Art as Performance (2004), arguably one of the most rigorous descriptions recently offered by institutional theories of art. I will show how this description importantly relies on Timothy Binkley's concept of piece-specification, a concept the latter developed as a response to Dickie's claim that artworks obtain their status by having it conferred upon them by relevant agents. While piece-specification comes much closer to an adequate account of an artist's accomplishment than Dickie's status conferral, I argue that it still fails to account for the properly creative quality of such accomplishments.
It is indeed a distinctive feature of artworks, of how we interpret and appreciate them, that their meanings and values always are thought to resist reduction under prevailing norms. And this, I will argue, is due in large parts to the fact that performances generative of artworks are intentionally achieved otherwise than by the generation of mere products. Consequently, if contemporary philosophers of art are to distinguish rigorously between artworks proper and other products, then they must provide an account of the creativity at play in the generation of an artwork. And it is my wager that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying might show the way toward a solution.
In section 2, then, I provide an explanation of Heidegger's concept of poetic saying, which he tells us describes the extra-ordinary events that are artworks: poetic sayings, we will see, articulate meaning(s) that are irreducible to the ordinary norms of intelligibility found in a historical world but may yet be understood by those who come upon them as providing a meaningful foundation to such worlds.
In the third section, following Stephen Crowell (Reference Crowell2008), I move to a more phenomenological interpretation of poetic sayings as artistic ‘meaning-events’ [Sinnereignisse], that is, as seemingly paradoxical events whose meaning(s), though intentionally brought about, are radically irreducible to preexisting normative horizons. I then move to isolate what I describe as the underlying intentional structure of such accomplishments. Though I will say more about this later, it is worth pointing out right away that Heidegger does not speak of Dichtung in terms of ‘intentionality’. This, then, can be considered as a first departure from a strictly exegetical approach of Heidegger's turn to art in his later philosophy.
Finally, in the last section of the paper, I apply the intentional structure of poetic sayings to the characterization of the intentionality that underlies the creative act of specification of an artwork as such. In other words, I will demonstrate how Heidegger's description of Dichtung, of meaning-events that are ‘great’ artworks, can be used by the contemporary philosopher of art to characterize a property of the accomplishment whereby any artwork can be situated as such in a given artworld.
Of course, Heidegger's explicit restriction of the concept to ‘great art’ entails that this conclusion will mark a second departure from Heidegger's views on art, a departure only made starker by my appeal to the concept of an ‘artworld’. Indeed, as we will later see, we have good reasons to think that Heidegger would have repudiated the very notion of an artworld as relevant to the proper ontological understanding of artworks. This entails that it will therefore prove impossible to avoid betraying the Heideggerian origins of Dichtung. Nevertheless: I will argue that by constraining my argument at every step by a strong requirement of coherence with Heidegger's phenomenological insights, my use of Dichtung remains Heideggerian in a substantive sense. In other words, my application of Dichtung’s intentional structure to the problem of artistic creativity, though incompatible with Heidegger's turn to art and philosophy of Being, will constantly and explicitly strive to remain at least coherent with a Heideggerian phenomenological account of the intentionality at work in meaning-events. And it is this coherence, I argue, that will allow me to conclude that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying can indeed account for more (or less) than just great artworks.
1.
In Art as Performance, David Davies argues that a necessary condition for something to be an artwork is that ‘the artist must consciously operate by reference to certain presumed shared understandings in order for her manipulation of a vehicular medium to count as the articulation of an artistic statement’ (Davies Reference Davies2004: 245). Davies's general claim in that essay is that what we appreciate as an artwork is not reducible to the perceivable features of the artifact produced by the artist but, rather, has to do with the manner in which these features serve to articulate her artistic proposition. An artistic proposition, or statement, corresponds to what the artist intends to convey by means of her piece. It can be likened to her semantic intentions (cf. Davies Reference Davies2004: 89).
What we appreciate as an artwork, then, is the artist's performance, how she has situated her proposition within the normative framework of the artworld by means of a particular vehicle. That is why Davies eventually writes that ‘an adequate account of what is involved in the proper appreciation of artworks [therefore] must take account of specific aspects of generative artistic performances’ (Davies Reference Davies2004: 50; my emphasis). I contend, however, that Davies's understanding of the artist's accomplishment misses the condition of ‘artistic creativity’ that bears on her performance and thus leads him to mischaracterize just what it is that receivers must take into account when they interpret and appreciate her work.
Davies's description of what ‘generative artistic performances’ entail significantly draws from Timothy Binkley's concept of ‘piece-specification’. Binkley developed the concept in reaction to George Dickie's thesis that something counts as an artwork when and where the status has been conferred upon it by a relevant agent of the artworld. While Binkley agreed that the specification of a piece as an artwork requires that one refers to conventions of one's artworld, he nonetheless argued that ‘artworks are created, not by christening things to be art, but rather by specifying pieces. . . . One can make a piece without explicit conferral, but one cannot confer art status without explicitly making (specifying) a piece’ (Binkley Reference Binkley and Aagaard-Mogensen1976: 103).
The act of specification corresponds to the intentional performance of situating one's accomplishment within an artworld. Given the role that the concept of ‘artworld’ is to play in my argument, it will be worthwhile to indicate how I construe its meaning. I understand an artworld as something like a normative horizon. The latter concept expresses, on the one hand, how the artworld's normative field can practically be distinguished from other normative fields and, on the other hand, how that distinction occurs although one cannot objectively assess its determinate and actual confines. As Stephen Crowell puts it: ‘Two things belong essentially to an horizon in the phenomenological sense: first, it is holistic; and second, it is essentially an interplay of determinacy and indeterminacy. . . . The horizon does involve the possibility of determining the indeterminate. . . . But the “indeterminate surroundings are infinite”, as Husserl says, and the horizon is “never fully determinable”’ (Crowell Reference Crowell and Parry2011: 36).
Accomplishing an act of specification, then, is to situate one's accomplishment in the relevant normative horizon. This is achieved by intentionally referring one's performance to the set of shared conventions and preunderstandings that is constitutive of the artworld's normative horizon. It is this intentional reference that then opens the possibility for other agents in that artworld to understand its phenomenon as an artwork.Footnote 3
The first thing Binkley notes about the relevant shared understandings is that they cannot amount to shared definitions of artworks. The reason is that the artist is free consciously to create a work—an artwork—that calls into question or flagrantly violates some salient feature of the concept of ‘art’ as it stood prior to the creation of the work’ (Binkley Reference Binkley and Aagaard-Mogensen1976: 97). Which is to say that any conventional definition of art always opens the corresponding possibility of accomplishing an artwork that is irreducible to that definition. Duchamp's Fountain and his other readymades were to him paradigmatic cases of such a possibility. But one could easily evoke a slew of other contemporary works to stress the point. This possibility has in fact become so evident in our artworld that Binkley eventually writes that ‘what makes “art” different [from other concepts] is that it is centrally involved with the creation of new instances of the concept’ (Binkley Reference Binkley and Aagaard-Mogensen1976: 99)—an important claim to which I will return shortly. What conventions must an artist refer to if not conventional definitions of art?
Think of cases such as the Erased De Kooning Drawing (1952) or Oldenburg's Hole (1967). There, we have fairly ordinary accomplishments (the erasing of a drawing, the digging and filling of a hole) that, we are told, ought to be understood as artworks. And history shows that though there were no definitions of art that guaranteed these accomplishments’ ontological status as artworks, the erased drawing and the filled hole are now both counted as citizens of our artworld. Yet, even in such case, argues Binkley, artists did not arbitrarily christen their piece an artwork. Rather, they have indexed it as such; that is, they have intentionally situated the meaning of their achievement within the intension of the concept ‘artwork’ by mobilizing indexing conventions, that is, shared understandings touching on the ways in which one may achieve piece-specification. In the case of literature, those shared understandings can be what Gérard Genette describes as paratext, that is, textual or formal features that are not the work itself but rather intentionally ‘frame’ a text, so to speak, in order to let it appear as a work of literature—a title, a generic indication such as ‘novel’, a preface, etc. (cf. Genette Reference Genette1987). In a word: when artists specify something as their piece, they refer to ways in which agents in their community are understood to be doing just that. This ‘reference’ works like an ‘intensional operator’, the act of specification unfolding like a prefixed proposition whereby the artist indicates how the meaning of her accomplishment is to be understood, relatively to the normativity of an artworld (Binkley Reference Binkley and Aagaard-Mogensen1976: 106).
It is to these ‘indexing’ or ‘framing’ conventions, then, that the act of specification must refer in one way or another in order for the meaningful content of its accomplishment to be recognizable as an artwork and to be appreciated as such. This is what David Davies understands by the concept of artistic media:
An artistic medium can be thought of as a set of shared understandings whereby an individual acting in certain ways . . . admits of particular descriptions in terms of which it can be seen as serving to articulate a particular artistic statement. . . . The artistic medium of a work, so construed, will be the means employed by an artist to articulate an artistic statement, and thereby specify a piece that is accessible to receivers. (Davies Reference Davies2004: 58–59)
The question looms, however, to what indexing or specifying convention Duchamp referred in his specification of Fountain. What artistic medium did Oldenburg's Hole mobilize in his performance?
A possible way to resolve this question might be to say that the two artists implicitly referred to their recognized status as an ‘artist’, a status conventionally establishing their capacity to specify something as an artwork. This is indeed Binkley's suggested account for Duchamp's Fountain: ‘Fountain was accepted as a work of art only because Duchamp had already established his status as an artist by producing works in traditional forms. This is probably true: not just anyone could have carried it off. You cannot revolutionize the accepted conventions for indexing unless you have some recognition in the artworld already’ (Binkley Reference Binkley1977: 275; my emphasis).
This suggestion however causes a problem for Binkley. In such cases, piece-specification ultimately resembles the sort of arbitrary decree that he explicitly thinks improper to the characterization of piece-specification. For if no closed definition of art is available and if the artist is thought to have invented the artistic convention mobilized by her accomplishment, then what we have is status conferral by a relevant artworld agent rather than piece-specification. Furthermore, insofar as the convention is being invented in the act of piece-specification, it is therefore not shared by artworld agents at the time, and this in turn invites us to think that it is not, as such, a convention the artist mobilizes.
Interestingly, Binkley may have been aware of this problem for he writes elsewhere that ‘success at specifying is not a question of whether you're an artist, but rather of whether you know and can use existing specifying conventions, or else can establish new ones’ (Binkley Reference Binkley and Aagaard-Mogensen1976: 98; my emphasis). Here, it is indeed far less obvious that success at piece-specification ever rests on the agent's recognized status in the artworld. Instead, what seems to matter most are the intentional modalities of her accomplishment. Accordingly, Binkley writes that ‘anyone can be an artist. [Again,] to be an artist is to utilize (or perhaps invent) artistic conventions to index a piece’ (Binkley Reference Binkley1977: 274; my emphasis). One is an artist, then, for having successfully achieved her intention of specifying her accomplishment as a piece. One is but a piece's artist, so to speak, a thought that is not so far remote from Heidegger's own views as we will later see.
Therefore, it remains unclear how piece-specification can be achieved when the shared indexing conventions are lacking that would allow us to secure the meaning of the artist's accomplishment as an artwork. Just as it was with conventional definitions of art, then, it seems that artists are always free to invent specifying modalities that eventually account for the description of their unconventional accomplishment as a piece of art. And indeed, when artists manipulate materials—‘vehicular media’ in Davies's terminology—that are radically novel, such as Duchamp's ‘gesture’ in his installation of Fountain or Oldenburg's ‘digging and filling of a hole’, we must think that new descriptions, new artistic media, will have to be devised that will indicate how the manipulation of said medium counts toward the articulation of an artistic statement (this indicates that vehicular media are also of a conventional nature).
Thus, Davies might be presupposing too much when he writes ‘the artist must consciously operate by reference to certain presumed shared understandings in order for her manipulation of a vehicular medium to count as the articulation of an artistic statement’ (Davies Reference Davies2004: 245; my emphasis). There are, as we have seen, artistic performances that do not rely on artistic media in this way. Of course most do in one way or another, and this ultimately makes these performances’ artistic proposition as such more accessible to some degree, but they do not have to. In other words, there are accomplishments that successfully situate their meaning in the normative horizon of the artworld yet do not appeal to any known specifying convention. We must therefore be able to account for the invention of these novel ways to accomplish piece-specification: if shared conventions are not necessary, then what is needed?
We now know that the relevant specifying convention or artistic medium can be invented, and often will be, by the artist in the very act of specifying her piece. The issue for Binkley and Davies here is that such a generative performance cannot be thought to rely on shared understandings. At the time of specification, the artist is the only one reputed to know the means of specification she is using, the artistic media she is inventing. But if we are to avoid the pitfalls that await all ‘private languages’, we must be able to account for how her specifying act and her invention of the relevant artistic media can still obtain recognition from an artworld public. What is it that opens the possibility for the artist's performance to call for an interpretative and appreciative effort that is to be constrained by the norms of the artworld?
The general answer I will give to these questions is that this is made possible by the artist's appeal to the normativity of her artworld at large. In order to be successful, her act of specification must somehow refer to and remain coherent with the normative horizon of the artworld. Given that no particular existing convention of the artworld ought to be mobilized for the act of specification to succeed, all that we can say for now is that reference to an artworld's normativity can therefore always be accomplished otherwise. But this, that the ‘reference be accomplished otherwise’, is, I believe, a specific normative feature that is distinctive of what we understand as the normative horizon set by our artworlds.
Taking my cue from Binkley's claim that what makes the normative context of art distinct from other normative contexts is ‘that it is centrally involved with the creation of new instances of the concept’ (Binkley Reference Binkley and Aagaard-Mogensen1976: 99), I want to argue that the shared understanding an artist must necessarily appeal to in the specification of her piece is the generally shared convention that the artworld is this institution or normative horizon where doing otherwise is the norm. It is in that sense that all performances generative of artworks must be artistically creative.
2.
Following Binkley and Davies, I have argued that we ought to think of performances generative of an artwork as accomplishing an act of specification whereby a piece is intentionally indexed as an artwork. However, I have challenged their view that in order to be successful, acts of specification must necessarily refer to the particular shared understandings or ‘artistic media’ that describe how one might intend to specify a piece. While piece-specification might, and often will, mobilize such artistic media, it need not do so. In fact, I want to make the more robust claim that an artist's generative performance must in some ways disturb the normative horizon and the conventions hitherto shared by artworld agents; piece-specification is always a matter of ‘creating a new instance of the concept’ in one way or another. The performance generative of an artwork must have the property of being ‘artistically creative’ in a merely descriptive sense (‘artistic creativity’ in this sense is a necessary property of performances generative of artworks; however, I do not claim that it is a sufficient property). It is this feature of such performances that has led me to claim that if any shared understanding must necessarily be mobilized by the artist for her piece-specification to be successfully recognized as such, then it can only be that distinctive feature of the artworld where the general norm is precisely to do otherwise.
Derrida once said of the institution of literature that ‘the law of literature tends, in principle, to defy or lift the law. It therefore allows one to think the essence of the law in the experience of this “everything to say”. It is an institution which tends to overflow the institution’ (Derrida Reference Derrida1992: 36). In the following sections, I want to show that this ‘law of literature’ can in fact be said to inform the normative horizon of our artworlds structurally. Artworlds open the possibility of intending the specification of one's piece by demanding precisely that one must to some degree intend its specification by means otherwise than those reputed necessary. In short, piece-specification must entail what one would readily call ‘artistic creativity’ in a merely descriptive sense. And to flesh out how an artworld opens the possibility of such an intentional performance I now turn to Heidegger's concept of poetic saying [Dichtung].
The concept features prominently in the ultimate moments of Heidegger's ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ where it is said to describe the very essence of art: ‘Alle Kunst ist . . . im Wesen Dichtung’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 59). Now, as I have said from the outset, this a claim I mean to take literally: all manifestations of art, all phenomena we understand as artworks, essentially accomplish a poetic saying. But given that Heidegger warns that it is only when an artwork is ‘the letting happen of the advent of the truth of beings’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 44) that it is a poetic saying, can I really make that claim and remain coherent with his views? To answer this question, I will look into the manner of the relation between the work and truth.
As Harries remarks: ‘Truth is not to be thought here in terms of correspondence or correctness’ (Harries Reference Harries2009: 169). What poetic sayings accomplish, rather, is an extra-ordinary or e-normous [Un-geheuer] grounding transformation in how a given people understands the intelligibility of beings in its world (cf. Heidegger (Reference Heidegger1977: 41): ‘Das Geheure ist im Grunde nicht geheuer; es ist un-geheuer’). A poetic saying is extra-ordinary or e-normous, that is to say, meaningful beyond the possibilities of meaning opened by the shared norms that ordinarily ground intelligibility in one's world. A poetic saying thus brings about an unpredictable normative shift in ‘the way human beings relate to these things, or better, the way they present themselves. Illuminated by a new light, they now appear other than they were’ (Harries Reference Harries2009: 169). In a similar vein, Torsen writes: ‘Heidegger defines all art as poetry (Dichtung), meaning that the essence of art is a kind of “projective saying” that names earth and worlds, gods and things, and thus opens up a geographical and historical region in which everything has its place and meaning’ (Torsen Reference Torsen and Kelly2014)
Obviously, this cannot be true of all things we readily understand as artworks. While it is in the essence of art in general to function thus in the founding and shaping of historical worlds, only in ‘great artworks’ is the poetic essence of art at work: ‘in the work of art, a happening of truth has been set to work [Im Werk ist ein Geschehen der Wahrheit ins Werk gesetzt]’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 21). Great artworks are those that will have proven to be ‘gathering meaning-events’. While the notion of ‘meaning-event’ will be addressed in the following section, we can already sketch an idea of the great artwork's ‘gathering’ power from what Heidegger's descriptions in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ when he says of the Greek temple that it gathers a world around itself: ‘It is the temple-work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 41; my emphasis).
The general idea here is that the accomplishment of a poetic saying such as the ‘temple’ realizes or manifests a meaningful response to Being, one that ‘names the holy’ as Heidegger will say in later texts and thus gathers its receivers under an understanding of ‘what is’ that comes to order their world and the possibilities of intelligibility therein. To borrow from Iain Thomson: the temple should be thought of as the poetic saying of ‘an insubstantial and ever‐changing “essential strife” that is built into the structure of all intelligibility (that is, the structure whereby entities become intelligible as entities)’ (Thomson Reference Thomson2011: 75).
Though I cannot go into details here, it should be noted that the genitive that precedes the quotation is used, as is often the case in Heidegger's writings, in both the objective and subjective sense. This is a point raised by Bernasconi: ‘the donation of the word holy is not the work of the poet . . . but is itself—borrowing a word from Hölderlin's Am Quell der Donau—“by the holy compelled”’ (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi1985: 39). A work of art, to Heidegger, is thus an extraordinary original event that brings Being to language and thereby founds novel possibilities of making one's world intelligible. And it does so by gathering a community in a historical dialogue that answers to what the temple is thought to indicate as the proper way to speak of what really is. What the insistence on the double meaning of the genitive allows us to see, however, is that the artist's semantic intentions do not determine the artwork's meaning nor its gathering power. Rather, the artist and her public both answer to what has been indicated and brought out by the work. Yet, as I will later show, this does not entail that artworks are not intentionally generated.
To Heidegger, then, poetic saying is essentially tied to and manifested by the historical function of great artworks in the founding and structuring of a people's intelligible historical world. Whether this characterization of art's essence as related to the foundation of intelligibility and the event of truth ought to be understood as a philosophy of art or not, it is undeniable that it was meant to play an important part in Heidegger's larger philosophical project. As Bernasconi aptly saw: ‘The idea that Being is founded on the word of the poet is fundamental to all of Heidegger's thinking after this time, and the philosopher comes to be thought of in similar light. Henceforth Being is always thought of in respect of its coming to language’ (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi1985: 38). Heidegger's frequent return to Hölderlin's ‘poetically, man dwells’ from the midthirties onward appears to me a clear indication of how he thought Being's coming to intelligibility to be shaped by its poetic appropriation.Footnote 4 Or, in other words, Dichtung was one of the essential ways in which Heidegger thought the historical achievement of intelligibility by Thinking: ‘Thinking, however, is the poetic saying of the truth of Being in the historical dialogue of those who think [Das Denken aber ist das Dichten der Wahrheit des Seins in der geschichtlichen Zwiesprache der Denkenden]’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1977: 372).
Seen in its relation to his philosophy of Being, it appears undeniable that Dichtung could only have been meant by Heidegger to account for the event of great artworks, no more, no less. However, we might obtain a different answer to the question asked in the title of this paper by looking at poetic saying from another perspective. What I want to suggest is that we can also consider poetic sayings as accomplishments that lend themselves to the historical function Heidegger assigns great artworks. In other words, I argue that it is coherent with Heidegger's insights to say that every artwork should be thought of as having been generated by the project of a poetic saying, and it is because this is so that some artworks can then be heard in their extra-ordinary proposition.
In the Hölderlin lectures, Heidegger writes that ‘every foundation remains a free gift [Zwar bleibt jede Stiftung eine freie Gabe]’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1981: 45). A poetic saying is a free gift, one could say, because its capacity to found originally a new order of intelligibility is not tied to any existing normative framework; it is not motivated by preoccupations made meaningful in that world. Understood as such a free gift, however, a poetic saying may not always be received in its extra-ordinary founding capacity. And indeed, Heidegger writes that ‘the anticipating word of the poet must also be long-standing—waiting in advance of what is to come [muß das vorzeitige Wort der Dichter lang—weithinaus wartend—sein]’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1981: 184). The mark of a great artwork is that it will have been received as such by the people who have gathered in the world or historical dialogue that the work has originally founded. But then it must be the case that something in the way artworks are brought about lends them this distinctive capacity. That is, while an artist's proposition awaits the historical dialogue where it might become a foundation to a people's world, it is nonetheless there, awaiting, as a poem, as a sculpture, as a work of fiction, as an artwork. And in order to be possibly heard in its original gathering power, the artwork must articulate a proposition that is extra-ordinary.
3.
Clearly, the conclusions I have just reached mark a departure from Heidegger's later philosophy of Being and of the role Dichtung was meant to play within it. That being so, I have given what I consider sufficient reasons to think that this interpretation of poetic saying remains at least coherent with his views. While it is obvious that not every artwork founds a new world, nothing seemingly makes it impossible that any artwork may eventually function as an original foundation.
What I now wish to argue is that this historical function of artworks is at least partly rooted in the kind of intentionality that structures the project and accomplishment of a poetic saying. This line of thought, however, immediately raises another problem for an argument that is to remain coherent with Heidegger's views. For, as I have shown in the previous section, the historical function tied to the event of poetic sayings can only be ‘set to work’ in the ‘dialogue of those who think’. This means that the event of a poetic saying, the gathering truth it manifests, cannot be the result of an artist's project to communicate a particular meaning or proposition: it is the work's capacity to gather poets and receivers in a historical world the work originally founds in its intelligibility that makes it a poetic saying and not the artist's intention, even if the artist is a genius. Bernasconi sums it up nicely when he writes that ‘it is the poem as origin that gives things their aspect and men their outlook on themselves. The projective saying [Dichtung] is not the project of a poet’ (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi1985: 40).
It appears, then, that the concept's original meaning is fundamentally allergic to an intentionalist account of the kind I mean to propose. And clearly the root of this allergy lies in the historical function Dichtung is meant to play in Heidegger's larger philosophical project. As a result, insofar as one is solely interested in an exegesis of that project, talk of intentionality can only be misplaced. Nonethelessm I want to argue that we can abstract the concept from its historical function without severing all of its ties to its original ground. If it is indeed at least coherent with Heidegger's views to say that all art can eventually be revealed as poetic saying, then it is plausible to think that something in the way artworks are generated opens up this possibility. Hence, rather than to think of the role of art in the founding of an intelligible world, I now want to consider poetic sayings as intentional achievements whereby extra-ordinary artistic ‘meaning-events’ are made possible.
Picking up on the extra-ordinary aspect of poetic saying, Stephen Crowell argues that its manifestation ought to be understood as a ‘meaning-event’ [Sinnereignis], a concept he borrows from László Tengelyi (Reference Tengelyi2005). A meaning-event describes ‘the emergence of a meaning that does not flow from some prior project or constitutive act’ (Crowell Reference Crowell2008: 261). As he quickly notes, this description of meaning-events appears to be incoherent with Heidegger's own phenomenology, for a meaning-event describes the experience of a meaningful reality that nothing in Dasein's world, no convention or preunderstanding, could fully determine. Yet, Heidegger is quite clear—in Being and Time at least—that a meaningful experience is always already intentionally determined by Dasein's projects, that is, by the manner in which Dasein appropriates the intelligible possibilities opened up by the normative framework of his world. This, then, is the particularity of a meaning-event: while it does unfold significantly in the context of Dasein’s experience, its meaning does not ‘flow from’ his constitutive projects. As Crowell puts it, quoting Tengelyi: ‘If the owned character of experience is understood as a kind of meaning-giving [Sinn-Gebung], then a meaning-event could be defined as “a spontaneous meaning formation [Sinnbildung] that cannot be traced back to a meaning-giving”’ (Crowell Reference Crowell2008: 262–63).
Hence, meaning-events, though necessarily brought about intentionally, involve something that resists all attempts at owning or mastering their meanings—either on the part of the artist or that of her public. On the one hand, as with any other meaningful experience, a meaning-event is an experience that is ‘mine’, that makes sense in ‘my’ world. On the other hand, something happens spontaneously at the moment of a meaning-event's determination that prevents the reduction of its meanings under the normal conditions of intelligibility available in my world. That is, the accomplishment of a meaning-event, such as a poetic saying, brings with it something radically other than what is contained in my world as a meaningful possibility. That is why Crowell writes that ‘one motive for introducing [the notion of meaning-event] arises whenever phenomenology reflects upon what is often called “radical alterity”’ (Crowell Reference Crowell2008: 263). How does radical alterity participate to the specification of an artwork? How can one intend to respond to radical alterity in a manner that may eventually become meaningful in one's world?
In ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, what manifests itself as radically other than the preunderstandings and norms that open up and constitute the intelligible world of Dasein is Earth, ‘that on which man bases its dwelling’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 21). Earth is not the a priori objective ground to man's dwelling nor is it an actual reality that transcends the conditions of Dasein's particular mode of being-there. Rather, Earth points to what the historical unfolding of language as World does not say. Earth is the nonnumerical sum of the other ways of being-there that the becoming of our world has deferred and relegated to nothingness. And it is that upon which man dwells because in Dasein's appropriation of a World, Earth describes the mute background upon which intelligible beings are carved out. Earth thus names this structural dimension of experience where radical possibility, rather than the actuality of being, is that to which experience answers.
Poetic saying, I want to say, is achieved by attending and answering to this dimension of experience: ‘The poet, like the phenomenologist in Heidegger's conception, is a student of the inconspicuous and the hidden’ (Bernasconi Reference Bernasconi1985: 43). If we understand poetic sayings as intentional performances generative of an artwork, then the extra-ordinary nature of an artist's proposition can be understood to originate in her answer to Earth in the sense just discussed. Having said that, it must be kept in mind that Earth does not refer to an actual, objective reality. What Earth names in the project of a poetic saying is, rather, the result of an intentional possibilizing. Such a possibilizing can be understood in relation to Iain Thomson's analysis of the ‘noth-ing’ at play in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’:
This active noth-ing of the nothing was the first name Heidegger came up with to describe the phenomenological manifestation of that which both elicits and eludes complete conceptualization, an initially inchoate phenomenon we encounter when we go beyond our guiding conception of what-is. To experience this ‘noth-ing’ is to become attuned to something that is not a thing (hence ‘nothing’) but which conditions all our experiences of things, something that fundamentally informs our intelligible worlds but that we experience initially as what escapes and so defies our ‘subjectivistic’ impulse to extend our conceptual mastery over everything. (Thomson Reference Thomson2011: 85)
Does truth, then, arise out of nothing? It does indeed if one understands that the ‘nothing’ does not correspond to some objective void; it is not un simple néant. Rather, as the ‘mere not of beings’, ‘nothing’ is first intentionally determined as negated actuality. However, it is more than the negation of what actually is: it is a radical possibilizing of all intelligibility, including the norms that order said intelligibility as a world. Therefore, Earth denotes not the objective ‘possible’ upon which the actuality of intelligibility becomes, but a radical possibilizing intended by the artist. As the result of this possibilizing or noth-ing, Earth describes that which, to the poet, is radically other than what already and actually is.
Poetic saying, then, can be understood to name this accomplishment where an artist intends to answer to what is otherwise than being. We may rapidly characterize how this happens in the following way. In its first moment, the artist's project is to attend to the contents of her experience while suspending the force of received norms and preunderstandings that would normally determine their meaning(s). To pick up on Thomson's quote, the artist noths what grounds her meaningful relation to intelligibility and peers into what is now simply there as sheer possibilities of Being. Then, in a second moment, she freely appropriates what is ‘there’ (every foundation is a ‘free gift’). As there are, in that moment, no normative forces constraining her response, she must accomplish her poetic saying through a kind of estimation of what may count as an appropriate response to what is ‘there’. Understood in this way, her artwork is determined through an accomplishment where she estimates rather than masters the appropriate way to articulate artistically a possibility of being that her world and its normativity could not have anticipated.
I say the artist ‘estimates’. I borrow this concept from Heidegger's later philosophy and adopt Crowell's reception of it as he writes: ‘here the meaningful space, or Dimension, is opened up by a kind of “estimating” [durchmessen]’ (Crowell Reference Crowell2008: 271). As an answer to radical possibility, the artwork stands as the free appropriation of a possibility that stood beyond the clearing of the world, that is, beyond any given normative horizons that could then justify or validate the work's appropriateness. That is to say, not only does the artist's accomplishment go beyond the beaten tracks, so to speak, but its result, the work's meaningful phenomenon, can only manifest itself as that which is a measure unto itself. The experience the work elicits thus also calls for a similar appropriation of its meaning: much like the artist, the one who receives and experiences the work can only estimate the meaning of what is there. And ‘that is what meaning-events ultimately involve’, writes Crowell, ‘the ordinary is experienced in terms of the (unknown) measure that makes it what it is’ (Crowell Reference Crowell2008: 274).
4.
These considerations should have prepared us to move now more resolutely toward the characterization of the intentionality at stake in ‘piece-specification’. I have claimed, at the end of the first section, that a condition of ‘artistic creativity’ bears on performances generative of artworks. Piece-specification requires that artists refer to the normative horizon of their artworld. But for this reference to be successful, the only necessary condition is that the artist consciously avails herself of the possibility of doing otherwise, a possibility that is distinctly opened by the institution of her artworld. It is to clarify what is entailed by this artworld norm of ‘doing otherwise’ that I have turned to Heidegger's concept of poetic saying in the second section of this paper. There I have shown how Heidegger thinks poetic sayings as extra-ordinary propositions: with the event of Dichtung, the ‘extraordinary is thrust to the surface and the long-familiar thrust down’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 40). In the third section, I have uncoupled this feature of poetic sayings from the historical role Heidegger holds great artworks to play in the founding of our intelligible worlds. In a manner I hold to be at least coherent with Heidegger's phenomenology, I have characterized all artworks as being accomplished by means of a poetic saying. In that sense, a poetic saying is an intentional performance that eventuates in an artistic meaning-event: one accomplishes an artwork by intending freely to appropriate possibilities of meaning that lie beyond the pale of what can be made intelligible within one's actual world. And it is this, the project of artistically intending to articulate a meaning not made possible by the normative horizon of one's world, that I now want to tie to the artistic creativity necessary to piece-specification.
The requirement that the artist accomplishes her piece otherwise than by means traditionally recognized is not without bringing to mind Kant's reliance on genius in order to open up the possibility that artworks might elicit truly aesthetic experiences. In both cases the demand is that the artist articulates her proposition in ways that defeat in advance any attempt at reducing it to a determinate meaning. Interestingly, Harries draws a similar parallel between Kant's turn to genius and Heidegger's understanding of the extra-ordinary event of an artwork when he writes that the latter also ‘gives us more to think than we can capture with our concepts. It thus resists all attempts to translate it into some already established and accepted idiom’ (Harries Reference Harries2009: 175). What the intentional account of poetic sayings and the act of piece specification have in common, however, is that they both reject the Kantian idea that this can only be the feat of a naturally talented individual or genius. Rather, all that is needed for piece-specification and poetic sayings to occur successfully is a particular modality of intentionality: one must intend to articulate a meaningful proposition otherwise than such articulations have traditionally been done, that is, in an extra-ordinary fashion.
But if piece-specification is indeed something like the project of a poetic saying, that is to say, the specification of an event that escapes possible reductions of its meaning as such under traditional norms and artistic media, the question remains as to how artworld agents may in fact recognize the piece as an artwork and eventually make sense of its proposition. How can we know to attend to their phenomenon as ‘meaning-events’ that call for artworld-relative interpretations? I believe that we can answer these questions by bringing together the two notions of poetic sayings and piece-specification.
As I have shown, though a meaning-event ‘does not flow from Dasein's projects’, poetic sayings can nonetheless be understood as intentional accomplishments, and this is so for two key reasons. On the one hand, it answers to Dasein's possibilizing or noth-ing of ordinary beings; it answers, that is, to an intentional accomplishment that suspends the normative force of one's world. On the other hand, it is undeniable that our world's history opens the intelligible possibility to engage in meaningful practices of artworks, including the project of their accomplishment or specification. That is, an artist can intend to accomplish a poetic saying or to specify an artwork because the possibility of such a significant project has effectively been opened by the norms that prevail in the artist's historical community. As Heidegger puts it: ‘The poeticizing projection of truth, which sets itself into the work as figure, is never carried out in the direction of emptiness and indeterminacy. In the work, rather, truth is cast toward the coming preservers, that is to say, a historical humanity’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 47).
Of course, the proper understanding of this last quotation ought to lead us back to Heidegger's philosophy of Being. The ‘coming preservers’ names those who will have entered the ‘historical dialogue of those who think’ that is founded in what will have been manifested as a great artwork. But I believe it can also be interpreted—albeit against Heidegger's philosophical turn to art as it relates to truth and Being—as saying that the project of poetic saying as eventuating in the specification of artworks as such is made possible by the existence of an institution, namely, an artworld, where other agents also familiar with this normative framework expect specified pieces to manifest themselves and their meaning in the guise of a meaning-event. In short, the artworld is this normative horizon where one can project to situate one's accomplishment intentionally as that which always already brings into question a world's normativity, including most specifically that of the artworld.
It is worth pausing here to recall a comment made earlier in the introduction in order to avoid the obvious objection. For not only am I aware that Heidegger would more than likely be opposed to this characterization of the artworld; he has in fact explicitly spoken against the very idea that our worldly practices of art are constitutive of the proper ontological characterization of artworks (see above, p. 4). In Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, for example, he writes that the proper consideration of the artwork's essence rather requires abstraction from the everyday preoccupations that normally inform our practices of art: ‘Aller Kunstbetrieb, er mag aufs äußerste gesteigert werden und alles um der Werke selbst willen betreiben, reicht immer nur bis an das Gegenstandsein der Werke. Doch das bildet nicht ihr Werksein’ (Heidegger 1977: 27). In a nutshell: the artworld, or the sum of our worldly practices of art [Kunstbetrieb], is not what makes something a work of art. Rather, it hides the true being of the work from thinking. That is, in the context of our everyday artistic preoccupations, artworks appear not as poetic sayings but as mere commodities (aesthetic, economic, decorative, etc.): ‘The whole of the art industry [Kunstbetrieb] . . . reaches only as far as the object-being of the works’ (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Young and Haynes2002: 20). Conceived in this way, the artworld can therefore only conceal (and make us forget) the true being of artworks.
However, I disagree with this characterization of the artworld. Rather, it seems to me that in our current practices of artworks agents of the artworld share an understanding of artistic creativity as a necessary condition for the generation of artworks. I do not deny that there is an industry, a world of artistic preoccupations, or a Kunstbetrieb, that forms an integral part of the artworld and that makes it possible to ‘forget’ how artworks come to be. What I contend is that before artworks become mere commodities, they will have been recognized as meaningful accomplishments that resist the everyday order of things. And this, I argue, is made possible by our artworld as this normative horizon where radically novel meanings may recognizably be set into work in a manner that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying helps us understand (clearly, much more would need to be said on this topic, but I must defer this discussion to another time).
In a fundamental way, then, the questions ‘How is this art?’ and ‘What does this mean?’ structurally participate to our every encounter with artworks, albeit to varying degrees. To engage with artworks means to attend to pieces the meaning of which, both as artworks and as meaningful propositions, are known in advance by artworld agents to be irreducible to conceptual mastery, i.e., to a determinate meaning under preexisting shared norms. Furthermore, the manner of one's interpretative response to these questions when considering a piece as an artwork eventually comes to shape anew one's understanding of just what art is or might be. Indeed, understanding the achievement of piece-specification as being intentionally structured like a poetic saying means that our capacity to establish that a piece has indeed been specified as such is also achieved by an ‘estimation’ of what has been accomplished. But this estimation is not absolutely groundless; a poetic saying describes, after all, a meaningful project the possibility of which has been historically opened up in our communities by what we now understand as the normative horizon of an artworld. And it is the estimating appropriation of a specified piece that, simultaneously, estimates and founds anew how art might be significant in the interpreter's world.
In conclusion, the act of specification situates its accomplishment within that normative framework by intentionally accomplishing a poetic saying that aims to be received as a meaning-event in the artworld. The shared understanding that must necessarily be mobilized in an act of specification is therefore not a defining or indexing convention—those can but do not have to inform such an accomplishment—but an understanding of the artworld's normative horizon as this space in our world where it is necessary to do radically otherwise (in one way or another and to varying degrees). The demand of the artworld to which the act of specification answers is to possibilize the very normative structures that normally determine a meaningful event and to shape one's meaningful production as an answer to the possibilities thereby made manifest.
In no way, then, should an act of specification be understood as the accomplishment of a poetic saying eventuating in a great or valuable artwork. Rather, I have argued that we must be able to describe the intentional structure of the act of specification as that of poetic sayings, which means that the work's accomplishment stands as something that is somehow radically novel in the historical context of an artworld. As to the value of this accomplishment, whether determined by its capacity to gather a community or by reference to other criteria, the very fact that the resulting phenomenon has been determined as a meaning-event indicates that there cannot be a priori norms to ground one's judgment. That too we will have to estimate.
