From Romanticism to Critical Theory by Bowie Andrew

Author:Bowie, Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
Published: 2002-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

The point is that these aspects cannot be said already to ‘be there’ as what they subsequently reveal themselves to be,17 even though the objects themselves in some sense must already exist. ‘Being there’ is still inextricably connected to truth, and the idea that the brute existence of things in a wholly indeterminate manner (which can anyway only be expressed via a questionable abstraction) is the best way to talk about their being is precisely what Heidegger—who, of course, knows his Kant—will not accept: ‘The temple first gives things their visibility [‘Gesicht’, via the derivation of what is now the word for ‘face’ from the verb ‘to see’] and first gives people the view of themselves’ (ibid. p. 39). It is also, therefore, not the case that the formal beauty of the temple is, in Platonic fashion, its link to truth. Without the tension and conflict which the work brings into being—which Heidegger describes in terms of the relationship of ‘world’ and ‘earth’ — things cannot truly be manifest.

He then suggests, this time in again less convincing fashion, that the same applies to the ‘language-work’ [‘Sprachwerk’, in analogy to ‘Bauwerk’] of Greek tragedy as to the temple. Heidegger sees tragedy merely in terms of the battle of the old and the new Gods. The argument actually works better, though, in terms of tragedy’s revelation of the nature of law, which emerges in the move from the order of a predominantly rural community to the order of the polis. Seen in this way, an Athenian tragedy like the Oresteia is not just a symbolic re-enactment of a past conflict, but the revelation of the truth that constitutes the forming of the state in which it is performed, the truth that the institution of law inherently entails conflict and suffering in ways which cannot be rationalistically explained away. There is, though, a missing dimension here. The fact that such a form of art is connected to a particular historical kind of community is, despite his references to ‘history’ and ‘Volk’, not seriously considered by Heidegger, with consequences we shall see in a moment. It does in many ways make sense to see Athenian tragedy, not as a symbolic expression of what that society already was, but as an event in which it revealed to itself what it was and constituted itself as a public sphere. The really important question is, though, whether this model makes any sense for, say, the drama of Weimar classicism, Viennese classical music, or Kafka’s ‘literature’. Furthermore, Heidegger does not seriously discuss how it is that Greek tragedy today still has a claim to truth in the sense at issue here; indeed, he seems to think that outside of their original context the works no longer have a claim to disclose truth in the same way. Let us, though, further elucidate the key terms in which Heidegger maps out his conception, where some of the same problems will be apparent.

The notion of ‘world’ means much the same as it does in his earlier work, namely the horizon within which things are always already intelligible.

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