Inheriting Walter Benjamin by Gerhard Richter;

Author:Gerhard Richter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

To pursue the question of the thing that emerged from a consideration of critique, Heidegger interrogates the logic of categories as modes of assertion, such as quality, relation, time and place. This interrogation leads him to assert that the thinking about the thingness of the thing and its truth are to be found not simply in the material there-ness of the object, but in certain principles of pure reason. According to the Kantian scheme as interpreted by Heidegger, ‘the pure inner lawfulness of reason, from out of its fundamental principles and concepts, decides about the being of what is, the thingness of things’ based on a series of principles (including the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason, among others) that can be schematized and formalized through an act of reason’s self-constitution. It is here that pure reason becomes ‘the authoritative court of appeal for the determination of the thingness of all things as such—it is this pure reason which Kant places into “critique”’.66 In short, we could say that Heidegger’s argument is that if critique for Kant is the self-knowledge of pure reason, then it is the question of the thing, even the thingness of the thing, that determines the principles according to which an act of understanding is grounded in a mode of reflective judgement.

While Heidegger lays out the general relation between critique and the thing in his engagement with Kant, a more detailed interrogation of the vexing question of the thingness of the thing is carried out in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. There, distancing himself from conventional views of the thing – as substance characterized by determinable characteristics, as the unifying term with which mind organizes the multiplicity of its sensory data and as the form of matter that is shaped into cognizable form – he advances a notion of the thing that unfolds on the far side of its tool-likeness or its mere equipment-character. To choose this path is, for Heidegger, to be invited to the table of ‘the feast of thinking [das Fest des Denkens], assuming that thinking is a craft [das Denken ein Handwerk ist].’67 Reminding us of the thingliness of even the most rarefied work of art, Heidegger writes: ‘The picture hangs on the wall like a hunting rifle or a hat. A painting, e.g., the one by Van Gogh that represents a pair of peasant shoes, travels from one exhibition to the other. Works are shipped like coal from the Ruhr and logs from the Black Forest.’ He continues: ‘During the war Hölderlin’s hymns were packed in the soldier’s knapsack together with cleaning gear. Beethoven’s quartets lie in the storerooms of the publishing house like potatoes in a cellar.’68 But Heidegger’s point is not to reduce the work of art to its thingness, however conceptualized, if by the thing’s thingness is meant only its conventional interpretations. That is to say, the point is not to perpetuate the concept of the thing as all that appears, as all

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